"In the streets through which we passed, I must own the houses in general struck me as if they were dark and gloomy, and yet at the same time they also struck me as prodigiously great and majestic"
About this Quote
Moritz gives you the tell twice: "struck me". This is travel writing as impact report, less postcard than psychological bruise. The sentence hinges on a contradiction he refuses to resolve: London (or any modern metropolis in the making) arrives as both oppressive and awe-inducing, "dark and gloomy" yet "prodigiously great and majestic". That doubleness is the point. He’s capturing the early modern city as an engine that manufactures sublimity out of soot.
The tiny phrase "I must own" matters. It reads like a confession offered to an imagined court of taste, as if admitting gloom risks sounding uncultivated, while admitting majesty risks sounding seduced. Moritz is negotiating a new aesthetic problem: how to describe greatness that doesn’t feel benevolent. The houses aren’t picturesque; they’re monumental. Their scale is architectural, but the mood is moral.
Subtext: the Enlightenment promise of progress has acquired a shadow. These streets signify power, wealth, empire, and the collective labor that makes them possible, but the human cost registers as atmosphere: darkness, heaviness, a kind of spiritual claustrophobia. By placing "and yet at the same time" in the center, Moritz dramatizes how the modern observer is split - compelled by grandeur, repelled by what grandeur requires.
The sentence also performs the city’s geometry. It keeps stacking clauses, expanding like the streets themselves, until the reader feels the same pressure: you’re hemmed in, then forced to look up. That’s Moritz’s intent: to make majesty feel like something that happens to you, not something you choose.
The tiny phrase "I must own" matters. It reads like a confession offered to an imagined court of taste, as if admitting gloom risks sounding uncultivated, while admitting majesty risks sounding seduced. Moritz is negotiating a new aesthetic problem: how to describe greatness that doesn’t feel benevolent. The houses aren’t picturesque; they’re monumental. Their scale is architectural, but the mood is moral.
Subtext: the Enlightenment promise of progress has acquired a shadow. These streets signify power, wealth, empire, and the collective labor that makes them possible, but the human cost registers as atmosphere: darkness, heaviness, a kind of spiritual claustrophobia. By placing "and yet at the same time" in the center, Moritz dramatizes how the modern observer is split - compelled by grandeur, repelled by what grandeur requires.
The sentence also performs the city’s geometry. It keeps stacking clauses, expanding like the streets themselves, until the reader feels the same pressure: you’re hemmed in, then forced to look up. That’s Moritz’s intent: to make majesty feel like something that happens to you, not something you choose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Journey |
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