Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/627

Rh But one had only to look at the triple locks of Schellingwoude on the east, at the locks and harbour of refuge on the North Sea, to be reassured. They were epics of triumphant labour embodied in massive masonry. Each of these stupendous blocks of stone had been hewn in Belgian or Norwegian quarries; each of the ponderous piles, carefully cased in its metal sheathing to protect it from injury from marine insects, had been cut in the forests of northern Europe. Since then the locks have been severely tried, but they have come successfully through the ordeal. Those at Schellingwoude are made free to all the world. As vessels of all burdens pass through them each day by the hundred, it may be understood what an impulse they must have given to the trade of Amsterdam; while in cutting another opening in their line of coast-defences, the Dutch have not only given a fresh challenge to the sea, but have snatched another victory from their enemy. The canal serves not merely as a great inland water highway, but as a mighty drain; and its expenses have been defrayed to a considerable extent by reclaiming the submerged lands that lie along it. Off Amsterdam ground for quays, warehouses, and graving-docks has been gained from the Ij, and the pile-founded city is not only protected by another line of stronger barriers, but has been sanguinely making extensive preparations for the revival of its old commercial prosperity.

There is enough of the romantic, as it seems to us, in all this to gratify the most ardently romantic of travellers, especially if he be somewhat sated with the picturesque in its more popular forms. But even the tame Dutch scenery wins on you insensibly; and, once fond of it, you never lose the attachment. In the sight of the limitless extent of meadow-land, cut up rectangularly at intervals by parallel ditches, grazed over by the drowsy herds of sleek black-and-white cows, and stretching away in the grey distance to a horizon vaguely indicated by the shadowy sails of innumerable windmills, there is something so original that you have no time to tire of it in an ordinary journey — say between the Hague and Amsterdam. The groups of cattle standing up to their hocks in the rank herbage, their well-favoured forms reflected in the pools as they lazily flick away the flies with their tails, are so many pieces by Cuyp or Paul Potter. When you do come upon a bit of copse-wood, or on a wind-blown, weather-beaten avenue of decently-grown timber near the Hague perhaps, or in the environs of Haarlem, you appreciate it all the more that wood is so scarce. You make an expedition to the far-resounding sea — as at the favourite watering-place of Scheveningen, or at Katwyck, where the Rhine is lifted into the ocean by the aid of elaborate machinery, and the scene recalls to you at once the marine pieces by Van de Velde. There you are between the sea and the sand-hills. The breeze is catching up the sand in drifting clouds, and swirling it about you in such flying columns as are the terror of the traveller in the Asian deserts. The leaden-coloured scud drifts across a lowering sky, and everything above and below would be the abomination of bleak desolation but for here and there a blue rift overhead that lets in a stream of sunshine, for the chimneys of the snug fishers' cottages that are smoking to landward, and the flotilla of dingy-sailed fishing-boats that lies rocking on the swell in the offing. When you are staying in a town, you leave your hotel for a stroll; you wander along quays between the stationary and the amphibious population ; you go tripping over the cables of ships and barges, unlading opposite their owners' residences, as they lie moored in wooded alleys under the shelter of umbrageous trees. You pass cellars and taverns, and look down the steps through the open doors at pictures such as Ostade and Teniers have familarized you with. The "sonsy" maiden of the burgher class, in handsome but unassuming costume, framed in the lozenged lattice she is looking out of, might be a reproduction of a Terburg or a Gerard Douw. Turning a corner, with the echoing clamours of some noisy wharf still resounding in your ears, you stumble on some choice morsel of medieval domestic architecture, buttressed and turreted, with its receding angles and projecting windows, reflected in the placid surface of the water that may have stagnated from time immemorial against the weed-grown bricks. And beyond the enceinte of the city, but still entangled in its network of canals, your heart is gladdened by villas and cottages. Often, indeed, they are vulgar to villainy in their style, but the vulgarity is redeemed by the luxuriant brilliancy of the gardens, with their blooming parterres and cages of gay-plumaged tropical birds, and shrubs and hedges that thrive marvellously in the damp, although tortured and contorted into every fantastic device.

On the whole, the Dutch have been a wonderfully conservative people, in spite 