Going out early one May morning to get my first sight of Berlin, I stood presently in a broad avenue.  In the centre ran a wide promenade lined with tall, full-foliaged trees, with a crowded roadway on each side bordered by stately buildings.  Close by me a colossal equestrian statue in bronze towered up till the head of the rider was on a level with the eaves of the houses.  The rider was in cocked hat, booted and spurred, the eye turned sharp to the left as if reconnoitring, the attitude alert, life-like, as if he might dismount any moment if he chose.  In the distance down the long perspective of trees was a lofty gate supported by columns, with a figure of Victory on the top in a chariot drawn by horses.  Close at hand again, under the porch of a square strong structure, stood two straight sentinels.  An officer passed in a carriage on the farther side of the avenue.  Instantly the two sentinels stepped back in concert as if the same clock-work regulated their movements, brought their shining pieces with perfect precision to the “present,” stood for an instant as if hewn from stone, the spiked helmets above the blond faces inclining backward at the same angle, then precisely together fell into the old position.  The street was “Unter den Linden.”  The tall statue was the memorial of Frederick the Great.  The gate down the long vista was the Brandenburger Thor, surmounted by the charioted Victory which Napoleon carried to Paris after Jena and which came back after Waterloo.  The solid building was the palace of iron-grey old King William; and when the clock-work sentinels went through their salute, I got my first sight of that famous Prussian discipline, against which before the summer was through supple France was to crush its teeth all to fragments, like a viper that has incautiously bitten at a file.

There never was a place with aspect more military than Berlin even in peaceful times.  In many quarters towered great barracks for the troops.  The public memorials were almost exclusively in honour of great soldiers.  There were tall columns, too, to commemorate victories or the crushing out of revolutionary spirit; rarely, indeed, in comparison, a statue to a man of scientific or literary or artistic eminence.  Frederick sits among the tree-tops of Unter den Linden, and about his pedestal are life-size figures of the men of his age whom Prussia holds most worthy of honour.  At the four corners ride the Duke of Brunswick and cunning Prince Heinrich, old Ziethen and fiery Seydlitz.  Between are a score or more of soldiers of lesser note, only soldiers, spurred and sabre-girt,—­except at the very back; and there, just where the tail of Frederick’s horse droops over, stand—­whom think you?—­no others than Leasing, critic and poet, most gifted and famous; and Kant, peer of Plato and Bacon, one of the most gifted brains of all time.  Just standing room for them among the hoofs and uniforms at the tail of Frederick’s horse!  Every third man one met in Berlin was