There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages.

The prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture.

There are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual Berlin hardly antedates.
There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air.
They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which fails of any impression.

If they were only furiously baroque they would be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is a self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic, more noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass.

This offensive art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic spirit, and bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in literature bears to romance.