CD Spotlight

A Celtic Grand Tourist: Prague a hundred years ago

"Warm, full of repose, heavy with happy sleep, at midday, at night the riverside becomes mysterious, a romance. The water silvers; with its islands, from which lights glimmer, it might be a lake, but for the thunder of the weir, which comes to you as you walk under the trees, or go out on a kind of platform beside a dusty mill, from which you see the water rushing violently towards the great wooden stakes by the bridge. Lights move on the opposite shore, at the foot of what seems a vast mountain, dimly outlined. The [Charles] Bridge, at first invisible, a detached line of lights, comes out gradually, as your eyes accustom themselves to the night-mist, in the palest of grey, like the ghost of a bridge. Beyond and above, the Hradcin [Castle] emerges in the same ghostly outline, a long grey line against the sky, out of which the cathedral spire points upward. It is a view which seems to have been composed, almost too full of the romantic elements to be quite natural; and it has something of whatever is strange, placid, and savage in the character of the Bohemians"

- Arthur Symons September 1903, Cities, describing Prague in 1897/99