"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home
with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go
through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our
neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we
shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
left my mind resting on the word _Prague_, with a strange sense that a
new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-
past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews of
night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten
grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of
memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal
gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river
seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed
under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient
garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and
owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to
and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It
is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of
ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd
the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp
of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who
worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or
hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on
in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without
the repose of night or the new birth of morning.