The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose.  There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style.  For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all.  This interior came together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo.  It was, unimpeachably perfect in its way, “Just,” March murmured to his wife, “as the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century was perfected in certain times and places.  But the odd thing is to find the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany.  I wonder how much the prince-bishops really liked it.  But they had become rococo, too!  Look at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave!  What magnificent swell!  How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the baroque style.  It expresses the eighteenth century, though.  But how you long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth.”

“I don’t,” she whispered back.  “I’m perfectly wild with Wurzburg.  I like to have a thing go as far as it can.  At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get.  I am consistent.”

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for Longfellow’s.  The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows, which now represent the birds he loved.  The cenotaph is surmounted by a broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the Meistersinger’s feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to themselves.  In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation.  “You are right!  Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can’t enjoy Gothic here any more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg.”