preconceived idea of it. All that is peculiar and characteristic seizes
upon the yet virgin eye, whose perceptive power is never more clear.

My idea of Berlin had been drawn in great measure from Hoffman's
fantastic stories. In spite of myself, a Berlin, strange and grotesque,
peopled with Aulic councillors, sandmen, Kreislers, archivist Lindursts,
and student Anselms, had reared itself within my brain, amid a fog of
tobacco-smoke; and there before me was a city regularly built, stately,
with wide streets, extensive public grounds, and imposing edifices of a
style half-English, half-German, and modern to the last degree.

As we drove along I glanced down into those cellars, with steps so
polished, so slippery, so well-soaped, that one might slide in as into
the den of an ant-lion--to see if I might not discover Hoffman himself
seated on a tun, his feet crossed upon the bowl of his gigantic pipe,
and surrounded by a tangle of grotesque chimeras, as he is represented
in the vignette of the French translation of his stories; and, to tell
the truth, there was nothing of the kind in these subterranean shops
whose proprietors were just opening their doors! The cats, of benignant
aspect, rolled no phosphorescent eyeballs, like the cat Murr in the
story, and they seemed quite incapable of writing their memoirs, or of
deciphering a score of Richard Wagner's.

These handsome stately houses, which are like palaces, with their
columns and pediments and architraves, are built of brick for the most
part, for stone seems rare in Berlin; but the brick is covered with
cement or tinted stucco, to simulate hewn stone; deceitful seams
indicate imaginary layers, and the illusion would be complete, were it
not that in spots the winter frosts have detached the cement, revealing
the red shades of the baked clay. The necessity of painting the whole