The Romantic School Author:Heinrich Heine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK III. PART I. Know ye China, the fatherland of winged dragons and porcelain teacups? The whole country is a vast cabinet of curiosities, surrounded by ... more »a remarkably long wall, and guarded by a hundred thousand Tartar sentinels. But birds and the thoughts of European scholars fly over the walls, and when they have feasted their eyes with the wonderful sights, they return to us, and relate the most delightful tales of that strange country and strange people. Nature with its garish and bizarre aspects, its curious and gigantic flowers, its dwarf trees, its mountains with outlines clear as sculptured work, its grotesquely-shaped but delicious fruits, its birds with fantastic plumage,— these are as marvelous a caricature as the people with their pointed cues, their profound obeisances, their long nails, their grave old-fashioned ways, and their childish, monosyllabled language. Nature and the human beings there can scarcely look at one another without inward laughter. They never laugh aloud because they arc both too civilized and polite, but in the effort to suppress laughter and keep straight faces, their features undergo the queerest contortions. They have neither shade nor perspective. Surmounting the gayly-colored houses are a multitude of roofs, piled one on top of the other, like so many open umbrellas. From these roofs hang little metallic bells, so that even the wind, rushing by, makes itself ridiculous by a nonsensical jingling. In such a little house of bells there once dwelt a princess, whose feet were even smaller than those of other Chinese women, and whose small almond-shaped eyes twinkled more sweetly and dreamily than those of all other dames of the Celestial Kingdom, and in her little fluttering heart, the most fantastic . caprices found a nest. Her greates...« less