"ROTTERDAM, May 28, 1820.

"We cleared out of the Pool on Sunday morning. I had been so much fatigued during the day that I was fast asleep by that time. In twenty-two hours we reached Helvoetsluys, with a brisk gale which was cheerful at first, but at last rocked the ship so as to make us all very sick. The master, by exaggerating the chances of our being detained a day or two before we could reach Rotterdam, persuaded us to go ashore. We set off, therefore, in company with three other passengers, to cross the island and reach this place by land. One of our fellow-travellers was a Dutch merchant, another a German, and a third a Polish Jew, who had graduated at Edinburgh; knew Jeffrey, Gregory, and others; flattered M., praised the Scotch ladies, and in fact attached himself to our party by sheer impudence. The Dutchman was very patriotic, and wished us to admire the scenery and character of Holland; but unhappily it rained; the roads were half-wheel deep, and the fields looked like the earth, two days after the Deluge. The whole island, as you may imagine Dutch scenery to be, is quite flat, but rich in verdure, as bright as that of England, and intersected by long colonnades of limes and willows, drawn up in lines as straight and long as an immense army at a review, or in order of battle. Our carriage was the exact shape and image of the Lord Mayor's; but the harnessing was only of ropes. During eight hours' dragging to get us to Rotterdam, I had all along admired the cleanness of every human habitation we passed, or entered into; but when we got in sight of Rotterdam, I was truly delighted. The approach to it is by the Maese, which is broader than the Thames at Westminster, and so deep as to admit ships of the line close up the quay, which forms the street fronting the river. The

to

ET. 42.]

ROTTERDAM-HAERLEM

GREAT ORGAN.

359

houses are elegant, and the streets beautifully clean. The river branches into canals that run into the main streets

"I wrote to you from Rotterdam. I was much captivated with the view of that city from the broad waters of the Maese. I visited the great church containing the tombs of the famous admirals, Van Tromp and De Ruyter, both of whom, as you know, gained victories over the fleets of England. We proceeded on Wednesday last through Delft, the Hague, and Leyden, to Haerlem— famous for its organ, and for being the birth-place of Coster, the inventor of printing, whose statue is in the principal square. Next morning, when I was sallying out, the waiter of the hotel came in great haste to tell me he must conduct me au premier-livre! which I thought meant something about the police. I followed him to a house where they showed me the first book ever printed; and which is old enough to satisfy the wildest bibliomaniac in the Roxburgh Club.

"I then visited the cathedral, and heard the organ played by Summach, a great performer, and even composer, who makes many hundreds a-year by playing to strangers for a guinea an hour-but the hour was worth the guinea, and many guineas. It was listening to the full poetry of music. The instrument has sixty-eight stops, and between four and five thousand pipes. The first piece was the Battle of Prague. I have no words to tell you how it took the heart and passions into the field! The trumpets sounded as over a vast plain, where you saw brigade after brigade extended, with flying colours. The drums beat; you heard the trampling of cavalry-the tread of infantry-the charging-step-the roar of artillery

-the shouts of victory—and the Te Deum! It was transporting!

"Then came a second piece-the Shepherdess in the Storm-that told a complete story—airs that imitated the warbling of birds, and the gurgling of waters; with now and then a sweet pastoral pipe that made you imagine some lively spot of scenery, where you could fancy the sun shining delightfully on rocks and waters, glades and trees. After a pause, the music grows mournful, as if the sky began to lower, and thunder is heard at a distance. The human voice, which the organ imitates to deception, begins to grow more and more plaintive; the thunder increases, and such is the power of this organ, that it seems to shake the cathedral, and in fact could not be distinguished from actual peals. Strains of an awful character succeed, with the human voice, at intervals, pleading with Heaven to appease the storm! At last it subsides, and you conceive the shepherdess rescued, and thanking God for her deliverance !

"From Haerlem we proceeded to Amsterdam-flat grassy meadows on either side of a canal that often stretches for miles as straight as a dart, the view now and then crossed by regimental rows of poplars, willows, or limes-branches running off from the main canal—and windmills and spires marking the distance. Till you come to Guelderland, scarce a sand-hill rises above the universal level; but this uniformity of meadows, with lazy cattle, is sometimes relieved by villas coming close to the water's edge, and dropping their shrubbery over the canal. Often, at a distance, you see country-seats moated with water; and this, I was told, is done to drain the little land that can be made into pleasure-ground-otherwise it would be marshy. In the gardening of those country seats everything is clipt and square; but now and then you see

AT. 42.]

DUTCH SCENERY AND CHARACTER.

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English pleasure-grounds imitated on a dwarfish scale. Altogether, however, there is too much foliage and water about their houses. This is the face of the country. The only animal that surprises you with liveliness is the horse of the Trackschuyt, that trots at the rate of four miles an hour! Every other creature seems half asleep. The cows feed with not a tenth part of the spirit of English cows. The storks sail lazily round your head, with snakes in their beaks, and are seen feeding their young in large nests, on the tops of the cottages, where the peasant reckons their arrival a blessing. The common tradition was, that the storks would not live in Holland under a crowned head; but the King of the Netherlands has been crowned; and the storks, like true Hollanders, take time to consider about removal.

"The face of the people is as unromantic as that of their country. The beggars receive your alms, and almost ask it, with indifference. At the Hague, a landlord overcharged me, and I called him a rascal to his face; at Amsterdam another treated me like a lord, and demanded no more than I should have paid at an alehouse in England. I thanked him for his treatment; yet the face of both hosts were perfectly the same all apathy and impassiveness! I must say, however, that where the Dutch face has expression, that little expression is good. Many of their women are pretty; and I have not seen one woman that I could suppose either a cruel mistress, or a quarrelsome wife. Their cleanliness is above all praise. Their houses are so painted and cleansed that poverty has absolutely no horrors in Holland. On the roads, you see peasants in the dress of the last century. The common people of both sexes wear wooden shoes: the women have ornaments of gold, or gilded metal, hanging like sheep's horns from the sides of their heads, and fastened with plates about their brows, under their caps.

"At Amsterdam the pictures of Paul Potter struck me with equal astonishment to what I had felt in the Louvre.* His imitation of animals will bear the examination of a microscope, and even looks more life-like when so examined. On the road to Nimeguen I visited a settlement of Moravians, which was very interesting. On our way hither last night, we witnessed the devastation occasioned by the breaking of the dykes in Holland, when entire villages were destroyed. The trees, in one direction, had been dashed down for miles, by the force of the ice. The scene looked like the relics of the flood. To-morrow I shall proceed to Cologne. T. C."

66

BONN, ON THE RHINE, June 9.

I have been a day in Bonn, and I have discovered Schlegel to my great joy; so that I shall not, for the present, proceed to Heidelberg. The difficulty of finding lodgings, and a separate boarding-house for my son, turns out to be greater than I had imagined. Forty professors, and five hundred and fifty students, make lodgings scarce and comparatively dear. I find Welcher, the librarian of the University, a very civil and attentive acquaintance. Schlegel was very happy to see me, and is very obliging; but his trick of lecturing, in conversation, appears to have increased with his appointment. He is ludicrously fond of showing off his English to meaccounting for his fluency and exactness in speaking it by his having learnt it at thirteen. This English, at the same time, is, in point of idiom and pronunciation, what a respectable English parrot would be ashamed of.-I have not got a separate apartment, so that I cannot begin to study; and until I have found a boarding-house for Thomas, and good lodgings, I shall not be settled.

T. C."