ople's memories, every summer, as
the storks came back to their platforms on the remote chimney-tops.
Without, all was as it had been on the eve of the Thirty Years' War:
the venerable dark-green mouldiness, priceless pearl of architectural
effect, was unbroken by a single new gable. And within, human life--its
thoughts, its habits, above all, its etiquette--had keen put out by no
matter of excitement, political or intellectual, ever at all, one might
say, at any time. The rambling grand-ducal palace was full to
overflowing with furniture, which, useful or useless, was all
ornamental, and none of it new. Suppose the various objects, especially
the contents of the haunted old lumber-rooms, duly arranged and
ticketed, and their Highnesses would have had a historic museum, after
which those famed "Green Vaults" at Dresden would hardly have counted
as one of the glories of Augustus the Strong. An immense heraldry, that
truly German vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid, eloquent, over
everything, without and within--windows, house-fronts, church walls,
and church floors. And one-half of the male inhabitants were big or
little State functionaries, mostly of a quasi decorative order--the
treble-singer to the town-council, the court organist, the court poet,
and the like--each with his deputies and assistants, maintaining, all
unbroken, a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours just noticeable as
they slipped away. At court, with a continuous round of ceremonies,
which, though early in the day, must always take place under a jealous
exclusion of the sun, one seemed to live in perpetual candle-light.

It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms, escaped
from that candle-light into the broad day of the uppermost windows,
that the young Duke Carl laid his hand on an old volume of the year
1486, printed in heavy type, with frontispiece, perhaps, by Albert
Duerer--Ars Versificandi: The Art of Versification: by Conrad Celtes.
Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third, he had the right to
speak on that subject; for while he vindicated as best he might old
German literature against the charge of barbarism, he did also a man's
part towards reviving in the Fatherland the knowledge of the poetry of
Greece and Rome; and for Carl, the pearl, the golden nugget, of the
volume was the Sapphic ode with which it closed--To Apollo, praying
that he would come to us from Italy, bringing his lyre with him: Ad
Apollinem, Ut ab