In a
hundred different ways I arranged the little houses of painted wood
around the church, with its pointed belfry and its red walls, where the
seam of the bricks was marked by fine white lines. I set out my two
dozen frizzed and painted trees, and saw with delight the charmingly
outlandish and wildly festal air which these apple-green, pink, lilac,
fawn-colored houses with their window-panes, their retreating gables,
and their steep roofs, brilliant with red varnish, assumed, spread out
on the carpet.
My idea was that houses like these had no existence in reality, but were
made by some kind fairy for extremely good little boys. The marvelous
exaggeration of childhood gave this little parti-colored city a
respectable development, and I walked through its regular streets, tho
with the same precautions as did Gulliver in Liliput. Luebeck gave back
to me this long-forgotten feeling of my childish days. I seemed to walk
in a city of the imagination, taken out of some monstrous toy-box. I
believe, considering all the faultlessly correct architecture that I
have been forced to see in my traveler's life, that I really deserved
that pleasure by way of compensation.
A cloister, or at least a gallery, a fragment of an ancient monastery,
presented itself to view.
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