In the evening the train carried me to Luebeck, across magnificent cultivated lands, filled with summer-houses, which lave their feet in the brown water, overhung by spreading willows.  This German Venice has its canal, the Brenta, whose villas, tho not built by Sanmichele or Palladio, none the less make a fine show against the fresh green of their surroundings.

On arriving at Luebeck, a special omnibus received me and my luggage, and I was soon set down at the hotel.  The city seemed picturesque as I caught a glimpse of it through the darkness by the vague light of lanterns; and in the morning, as I opened my chamber-window, I perceived at once I had not been mistaken.

The opposite house had a truly German aspect.  It was extremely high and overtopped by an old-fashioned denticulated gable.  At each one of the seven stories of the house, iron cross-bars spread themselves out into clusters of iron-work, supporting the building, and serving at once for use and ornament, in accordance with an excellent principle in architecture, at the present day too much neglected.  It is not by concealing the framework, but by making it distinct, that we obtain more character.

This house was not the only one of its kind, as I was able to convince myself on walking a few steps out of doors.  The actual Luebeck is still to the eye the Luebeck of the Middle Ages, the old capital of the Hanseatic League.[B] All the drama of modern life is enacted in the old theater whose scenery remains the same, its drop-scene even not repainted.  What a pleasure it is to be walking thus amid the outward life of the past, and to contemplate the same dwellings which long-vanished generations have inhabited!  Without doubt, the living man has a right to model his shell in accordance with his own habits, his tastes, and his manners; but it can not be denied that a new city is far less attractive than an old one.

When I was a child, I sometimes received for a New Year’s present one of those Nuremberg boxes containing a whole miniature German city.  In a hundred different ways I arranged the little houses of painted wood around the church, with its pointed belfry and its red walls, where the seam of the bricks was marked by fine white lines.  I set out my two dozen frizzed and painted trees, and saw with delight the charmingly outlandish and wildly festal air which these apple-green, pink, lilac, fawn-colored houses with their window-panes, their retreating gables, and their steep roofs, brilliant with red varnish, assumed, spread out on the carpet.

My idea was that houses like these had no existence in reality, but were made by some kind fairy for extremely good little boys.  The marvelous exaggeration of childhood gave this little parti-colored city a respectable development, and I walked through its regular streets, tho with the same precautions as did Gulliver in Liliput.  Luebeck gave back to me this long-forgotten feeling of my childish days.  I seemed to walk in a city of the imagination, taken out of some monstrous toy-box.  I believe, considering all the faultlessly correct architecture that I have been forced to see in my traveler’s life, that I really deserved that pleasure by way of compensation.