what madness is) is no explanation at all.

An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon
worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien
Regime. And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of its own
landscapes. A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming with
the prince's game; a picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins;
and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with its French
fountains and gardens, French nymphs of marble, and of flesh and blood
likewise, which the prince has partially paid for, by selling a few
hundred young men to the English to fight the Yankees. The river, too,
is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was
blown up in the Seven Years' War; and there is but a single lazy barge
floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene
Highness; the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are
at the wars, and the place is tumbling down; and the two old peasants in
the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine-twigs, are
very picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.

How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic
beauty of the scene destroyed;--to have steamers puffing up and down the
river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old
World, in exchange for the wealth of the New--or hurrying, it may be,
whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they
know for what. How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists,
and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure. How sad to see
the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to
the very steeple-top;--a new school at the town-end--a new crucifix by
the wayside. How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of
England or Belgium, doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the