The Henson Journals
Wed 14 August 1901
Volume 150, Page 8
[8]
Wednesday, August 14th, 1901.
We left Hamburg for an excursion to Lübeck & returned in the evening. Trains were excellent & the expedition went off well. The distance is 40 miles.
Lübeck is the most beautiful & the least considerable of the three great free cities. It is extraordinarily rich in churches: & these built of brick, & therefore externally very plain, are spacious & even splendid fabrics, &, which is not so common in these parts, very well kept. The Marienkirche & the Dom are, so to say, historic rivals: the one representing the pious importance of the citizens of Lübeck, & the latter the ecclesiastical dignity of its prince–bishop. Both are crowded with monuments, but those of the citizens exceed all tolerable limits in size, grotesqueness, & vulgarity: the picture of the departed worthy commonly adorns the pompous & tasteless mass of an erection, which has cut through fair columns & destroyed the architectural effects of a whole chapel in order to find room for its erection. There is a curious clock, before which quite a crowd collected at noon to see the procession of the hours in the shape of 12 tottering apostles, whose gait seemed eloquent of the Rathskellen. The wealth of wood carving, colour, & fairly excellent pictures impress the visitor to these Lübeck churches. The Dom has retained many medieval features, notably, the immense rood (15th century). The fine 14th century tomb of the archbishop who built the choir is a notable specimen of that artistic period. The 13th century porch, lately restored, is very fine. The Dom is not only beautiful itself, but it is beautifully: placed in the midst of fair gardens. The Hospital of the Holy Ghost is entered by a lovely 13th century chapel, which has been restored & painted up quite recently.
The Jacobikirche, Petruskirche, & Katherinen kirche (the latter secularized into an exhibition room for bad modern daubs) are all notable buildings. The Rathshaus is splendid, built of glazed bricks & full of the sumptuous carved work, in which the medieval merchants delighted. If it can hardly be said that the streets of Lübeck present a medieval appearance, it is certainly true that they contain a large number of medieval houses & grow on the observer as he moves about in them. Here also I sacrificed a ten–days beard, which had degraded me sufficiently. We returned to Hamburg about 9.30 p.m. & betook ourselves shortly to bed.