of six or seven feet in width. These ditches are sometimes lined with high and dense hedges, particularly along the public road. The owner's mansion is placed in the centre of his grounds, near the highway, and as usual, is built of brick. It has never more than two stories, and frequently but a story and a half. What it lacks in height, however, it gains in breadth-like the proportions of the immortal Van Twiller, who stood five feet six inches high, and just six feet five inches round. The lov windows of the parlor open on a court-yard, disposed in varied plats and blooming with tulips and roses. Fruit-trees or forest-trees embower the front and sides, and sometimes you see the beautiful wild vine twining its tendrils around their green branches. And then there is one thing which gives a wonderfully cozy air to all this-an arrangement that you will find absolutely nowhere 'but in Holland. The mansion and its immediate grounds are completely isolated from the surrounding lands, unapproachable to an evil-minded obtruder, except at the risk of his getting ducked and perhaps drowned. When seeking admittance to them, you stand in the highway and announce yourself by jerking a wire, which carried along the tops of posts across the ditch and the court-yard, communicates with the kitchen bell. In a few moments the servant appears, and if you are on foot, she swings out the little bridge, which commonly revolves on a pivot, and receives you at the opposite end. When you have crossed, the bridge swings back again to its former position. The draw for carriages is lowered only when occasion requires. You are inevitably reminded, in looking at these queer arrangements, of those old feudal times, when each lordly home was a castle of defence, and the admittance of a stranger as important and ceremonious an affair as the surrender of a small city. A less erratic imagination than Don Quixote's could transform that harmless ditch and fragile bridge into a yawning moat, and threatening draw, and the fair girls peeping stealthily from the embowered windows, into some haughty baron's daughters with songs of love and chivalry upon their lips, caught from gay knight or strolling troubadour. It was the last day but one of our sojourn here, that my companions and myself ascended the Cathedral tower, to take a farewell view of pleasant Rotterdam. We had mounted it more than once before, and since those visits had made a delightful pedestrian excursion to the north, to Delft and the Hague. The little sexton had not forgotten us, nor our resentment of his attempted imposition and so, taking quietly the silver that we dropped into his hand, he sent up with us a flaxen-haired juvenile, who had learnt French at the public school, and now served as his father's interpreter in ordinary and extraordinary. The boy dashed off thro' the dark passage in the tower, and had half reached the summit, when we had but just commenced groping our tortuous way. Notwithstanding that these hundreds of towers in the European cities are visited annually by hundreds of travellers, and have stood there hundreds of years, not a blessed noddle in all Europe ever conceived the scheme of raising people to their top by means of steam. That improvement, I say it with glowing pride, was reserved for Yankee ingenuity. There is barely one predicament worse than that of going up through all these old corkscrew gyrations, and that is coming down again. The passage is always narrow, precipitous and dark, and the occasional gleams of light that peep in upon you through the loop-holes, only blind you the more effectually. You get dizzy, bewildered. But you must just put your trust in Providence and strike your pedals out boldly. You are sure of arriving at the bottom by some means. I wonder why no one ever thought of placing the aspiring indi vidual in an Archimedes' screw, and making him gravitate upwards. Deeply occupied with such and sundry meditations, I reached finally the light and the summit, and after a few moments' repose, recovered breath and patience. From regard to his feelings, we asked our guide some questions about the neighboring localities, which of course he couldn't answer, and then arranging the pocket compass and map, we began the panoramic study before us. "God made the country," Cowper says, "and man the town," but in Holland it seems as if man made both. If nature must have the credit of it, however, then she was playing a pleasant freak when she designed Holland. She made Holland as she carries on a crystallization. Every thing there is in planes and angles, the only curved line being that of the horizon. You are reminded of those pictures which you see in the old Bibles of a European library, where whole leagues of landscape are as regularly arranged as the plats of a garden, with a dozen prim trees on this side, balanced by precisely a dozen prim trees on that, and the whole expanse of a most remarkable flatness. Your horizon, in almost its entire circumference, is as regular as the horizon at sea. The tail windmills are the only objects that interrupt the long line, and seen through a gloaming mist, when the wind is still, they look not unlike great ships drawn up in crescent form, and preparing to bear down upon you. They lend an exceedingly strange appearance to the landscape. You walk out at evening through the broad, silent fields, and they stand there, throwing their white arms up into the moonlight wearily and slowly, as if tired with the long labor of the day. And then you listen to the humming of the wind through the huge ribbed frames, now swelling louder and louder, and again dying to a low, mysterious moan, borne feebly to your ear upon the fitful breeze. Then it rises once more, and rings out, musical and full as the blended tones of so many vast æolians. A Dutch landscape is as incomplete without a dozen windmills as an Egyptian landscape without its three pyramids. The pyramids are visible from every point in the Egyptian territory, and the windmills in Holland dot the country like farm-houses in our most populous farming districts. Toward the north rise the spires of the capital, and a little on the right, broad marshes extend along to the eastern horizon. But the entire space between them and Rotterdam is one vast pasture-ground, green and smooth, and divided by wide ditches, and an occasional hedge. The ditches and numberless canals seem to cover the landscape as with a net-work of shining silver thread. The highways that generally lie along the margin of the latter, are paved with stone or brick, and are completely embowered in foliage: so that often their position is known only by the lengthened rows of trees and of windmills along their side. From the southeast comes the deep-swelling Rhine-flood, sweeping down upon the low plains, and then spreading far and wide, as if to gain one last, lingering view of the dear fatherland, before sinking to its eternal rest in the sepulchre of the sea. And on your left roll the dark waters of the German sea, that peering now and then above the strong dykes, seem like a beleaguering army, encamped on the confines of the devoted land. "The pent ocean," says Goldsmith, in his rich numbers, "rising o'er the pile, Sees an amphibious world beneath him smile; A new creation rescued from his reign." Holland, like the lowlands in the valley of the Po, is at the mercy of a most treacherous foe. It is hohl-land, that is hollow-land. The surrounding masses of water all impend over it. As you sail down the Rhine, you see only the roofs and chimneys of the houses, reaching above the top of the dykes. The water within the dykes is still and almost stagnant, except where the windmills produce a gentle current; for some mills here, instead of being worked by water, work the water, themselves. There are other towns in Holland, much more interesting than Rotterdam. At the Hague, you find two or three quite respectable galleries of paintings, enriched by master-pieces from the hand of Rubens and Murillo, and many native artists. The Assumption of Murillo is a brilliant effort, though showing hardly a solitary characteristic by which you might recognize it as his. The Blessed Virgin is seen rising, and a flood of vivid, unearthly light streams down upon her form, and tinges the surrounding clouds with a soft, silvery lustre. If you will, we may make a trip to the Hague together, one of these pleasant mornings. Albany, 1847. Albany, 1847. THE BRIDAL WREATH. BY H. 6. M'CALL. I. Come twine with me a bridal wreath The "flowering-fern" we'll bring with care, With "" friendship" hand in hand now range, For "beauty joined with piety," Alone can say, "I do not change." We'll have a lasting "bond of love," A "healing gift"-" bright freedom's" palm, Well decked in robes of "modesty❞— An "expiation" from all harm. We'll spend our hours of "revery" In scenes of "peace," and acts of "love," And thus by" amiability," Gain that "true love" which reigns above. FRESH GLEANINGS, Or a New Sheaf from the Old Fields of Continental Europe, by IK. MARVEL: New York, Harper & Brothers, 1847. Another book of European travels! Another traveller who must tell the world what his pair of eyes saw in Paris, and in Rome! "What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" Is there no end to the cloth-covered volumes which, month after month, under the names of "Guidings," "Pencilings," and "Gleanings," pour from the press, to inform the public that their authors have strolled on the Boulevards, and drank coffee in a Parisian café? We fancy not. As long as pens and ink are cheap, and printing not much dearer, travellers will write, and having written, they will print. And after all, the evil, if it is one, is small. The public, if they please, may keep their purse-strings tight, and then no one suffers but the author, and perhaps his publisher. And then there is one benefit derived from this increase of books of travels over well-known countries. The impressions which travellers receive, are as diverse as the colors of the eyes with which they look, or as the spectacles with which, the fable says, Jupiter once supplied the human race. One traveller, the moment he leaves his country, puts on magnifying glasses, and then "Returning from his finished tour, he can see nothing worthy of praise, which is not European. Another wears "near-sighted" glasses, and to him the "Shame of England" eclipses its "Glory." Another puts on blue glasses, and tells the public, with a grumble, of poor breakfasts and populous beds. And a last is fated to peep through ground glasses, and travel about as if in a fog. He sees little or nothing, and blesses himself when he returns, that his travels are over. From the varying accounts which are thus brought home, we who sit by our firesides are able to form a tolerably correct notion of Europe. Mathematically speaking, we arrive at one result by alligation. We gather one piece of information here, and another there; one tells us of St. Peters, another of the grisettes; Miss Biddy Fudge writes about Colonel Calicot, and her brother Bob about the Verys. Mr. Marvel is the latest writer,* we think, of European travels, and we therefore wish to examine his book, and see what new information can be gained from it, And in the first place, one thing cannot be found there, and that is statistics. With the exception of a short note on the Island of Jersey, Mr. Marvel has wisely left populations and distances to the ⚫ We are wrong. Even while we write, another volume of travels on the continent of Europe, has appeared, called "A Budget of Letters." |