Amsterdam

“ On this old-world island on the Zuyder Zee, close as it is to Amsterdam, the people wear a costume which is comically picturesque.
The streets of Amsterdam are delightful, with their curious and variegated gables, and the angles at which the houses lean, supported as they are more by each other than by their rotting pile-foundations driven into peaty mud. ”

“ Shortly after these, Amsterdam appears. At the first aspect of the city, even after having seen all the other parts of Holland, you cannot restrain a gesture of astonishment. It is a forest of lofty windmills in the form of towers, steeples, pyramids, light-houses, truncated cones, and aerial houses, waving their enormous arms, and whirling above the roofs and domes like a cloud of monstrous birds beating their wings over the city. In the midst of these mills rise innumerable factory-chimneys, masts of ships ”

“ High above the city rose numerous quaint steeples and yet more ancient towers, and Amsterdam's Italian prototype could never have presented a more bewitching picture than when on one of those marvellous nights, not infrequent in Holland, the moon lit up the scene with a light whiter, purer than that of electricity, and of a living beauty the very reverse of electricity's ghastly glare. ”

“ This regularity of form, by which the eye can range on every side, gives to the city a grandiose aspect. At every turn of a street you see in a new direction three, four, or even six drawbridges, some rising, some falling, some closed, and some in motion, presenting a confused perspective of beams and chains, as if Amsterdam were composed of so many enemies' quarters, all fortified against each other.
Canals, as broad as rivers, form here and there spacious basins, around which you can go, by a succession of bridges joined one to the other. ”

“ Amsterdam after Paris may suggest water after wine. A watery city it is and water is excellent at times, if not always. The water streets of the Dutch capital are, sometimes, if not always, inky, and ink of an odor best described by prefixing a couple of consonants. Yet old Amsterdam is full of charm, though not of the Parisian kinds. Its quaint houses have a general look of being turned end-on to the street, their ornamental gables make a sky-line suggestive of a lady’s lace collar. Many of them have a projecting crane with rope and pulley, giving a warehouse appearance to private dwellings. ”

“ Krasnopolshy’s—a town, not a café—is said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It isn’t; but it is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a million people.
In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the quality which above all others a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and boil over into its public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of its shops. ”

“ At Amsterdam there is the finest picture gallery in Holland.
The stranger who enters it prepared to admire the two greatest works of Dutch painters, has no need to inquire where they are. He has scarcely crossed the threshold, when he sees a small room filled with silent, motionless people, and entering, finds himself in the most sacred penetralia of the temple. ”

“ The great city of Amsterdam itself, with its banks, its docks, and its thousands of fishermen and artisans, founded, as it was said, on the carcases of herrings, was the centre of the commerce and the opulence of northern Europe. The Venice of the North, alike in her commercial prosperity and her close oligarchical government, she so far dominated over all her colleagues that in the days of her greatness the United Provinces were little less than Amsterdam writ large. Shorn of the province of Holland, the country certainly could not have maintained its independence for a moment. ”

“ Make your way thence to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and you will have to conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all its habitations empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and lofty and golden, are crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and dominated by rhapsodic orchestras of women in white who do what they can against the hum of ten thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of waiters, and the clatter of crockery. ”

“ The Exchange, on the contrary, which stands facing the palace, and has a porch sustained by seventeen columns, is known as the door without a house; a joke which every Dutchman makes a point of repeating to strangers, with the slightest possible smile curling his lip. Whoever arrives in Amsterdam in the first week of the Kermesse, which is the Dutch carnival, may behold a curious spectacle within this building. ”

“ You can scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue of a nonentity in Holland, because there are scarcely any statues.
Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland. Its architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively immanent in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of it in the mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer. Amsterdam has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever passed through the head of a stock-broker. ”

“ I will not grieve their patience, however, by describing minutely the increase and improvement of New Amsterdam. Their own imaginations will doubtless present to them the good burghers, like so many painstaking and persevering beavers, slowly and surely pursuing their labors—they will behold the prosperous transformation from the rude log hut to the stately Dutch mansion, with brick front, glazed windows, and tiled roof ”

“ Like a landscape melting into distance, they receive a thousand charms from their very obscurity, and the fancy delights to fill up their outlines with graces and excellences of its own creation. Thus loom on my imagination those happier days of our city, when as yet New Amsterdam was a mere pastoral town, shrouded in groves of sycamores and willows, and surrounded by trackless forests and wide-spreading waters, that seemed to shut out all the cares and vanities of a wicked world. ”

“ I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam—a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his chin and a reddened nose) ”

“ And so we come to Amsterdam, the oddest city of all,—a city wholly built on piles, with as many canals as streets, and an architecture so quaint as to even impress one who has come from Belgium. The whole town has a wharf-y look; and it is difficult to say why the tall brick houses, their gables running by steps to a peak, and each one leaning forward or backward or sideways, and none perpendicular, and no two on a line, are so interesting. ”

“ This impression of Amsterdam by a seventeenth century author 1 takes us back to the time when no rivals had yet contested with the town its commercial monopoly,— when its full and radiant display struck the eyes of every visitor. Tempted though we feel to recall this glorious past (the period and direct surroundings of its greatest painter) , we naturally take Amsterdam's present state as a basis, and in doing so painfully notice the loss of precious reminiscences which the course [pg 112] of time has inevitably involved. ”

“ Excursions About Amsterdam It is doubtful indeed if any other city in Holland than Amsterdam can tempt the tourist with a greater number of pleasant day’s excursions. Lying at the very feet of North Holland—a travel territory no larger in area than the state of Rhode Island, but replete with picturesque nooks and corners, congested with types and abounding in peculiar customs—every part of the province is readily accessible to Amsterdam by rail or by water. Back of its central railway station there is a long line of docks which berth the boats that only await your patronage. ”

“ But between the Amsterdam of yesterday and the Amsterdam of to-day there is hardly the ghost of a likeness. The modern city is a very modern one indeed; a thriving commercial place, with only an occasional and more or less accidental picturesqueness in its streets, and no picturesqueness at all in its people. ”

“ Men, women, children — of all lands, nations, and tongues — were in full activity. The shipwrights' hammers, the creaking of the cranes, the seamen's oaths, the squabbles of the market-place, the gabbling in the schools, the clatter of the sleighs, the chaffering, badgering, bullying, the slave-driving going on without a moment's cessation upon all the' quays, in every warehouse and from every street, proclaimed Amsterdam the mart of the world, the centre of its business. ”

“ And so, up and down the Spanish peninsula, up but not down the Russian steppes, the Hollander who cared too much for trade to bother about politics is forced to march for the glory of that letter N. Amsterdam is reduced from the richest city in Europe to a forgotten nest, where the grass grows on the streets and where half of the population is kept alive by public charity. ”

“ No man can walk along the broad strand street of New Amsterdam, and then up into its parallel street, so back towards the starting-point, and down again to the sea, without thinking of Knickerbocker and Rip van Winkle. The Dutchman who built New Amsterdam and made it once a thriving town must be still sleeping, as the New York Dutchman once slept, waiting the time when an irruption from Paramaribo and Surinam shall again restore the place to its old possessors. ”

“ Surrounded by calculating business men who kept a tight grasp on their money bags, he assumed the rôle of an artist scattering money with a free hand; surrounded by small townsmen most proper in demeanour, he revealed himself as the bold lasquenet, frightening them by his cavalier manners. He brought together all manner of Oriental arms, ancient fabrics, and gleaming jewellery; and his house became one of the sights of Amsterdam." His existence reads like a fairy tale. ”

“ On every side you see dykes, bridges, locks, palisades, and basins, presenting the aspect of an immense fortress, so constructed as to baffle the curiosity of anyone who might seek to discover its form; and this, indeed, can only be done by help of a map, and after several hours' walk. From the centre of the city, at a distance of a thousand metres from each other, two great dykes on arches start in opposite directions, and embrace and defend from the sea the two extremities of Amsterdam which extend beyond the semicircle of her houses like the two horns of a half-moon. ”

“ Amsterdam, the capital of the new Dutch commonwealth, the rich city which alone counted more people within her wide walls than all of the country provinces put together, had ever been the leader in all matters which offered the chance of an honest penny. ”

“ Here a crowd of men, the most varied in nationality and tradition, were all one in their worship of the presiding genius of the city. The bridge stood in front of its temple. The Exchange was the true centre of the religion of Amsterdam. ”

“ His letter to Jerome Beverningh ended thus—
“We must consider Amsterdam as the heart of the State, by which succour may be carried to all its members; so that, under God’s guidance, we may fight against the enemy for our country to the last man, and with Dutch constancy.” ”

“ I shall then become the richest individual in Amsterdam, and I have resolved to employ my wealth in rebuilding the city. I purpose to lay the foundations with granite instead of wooden piles, on which it now stands; to increase the width and depth of its canals, and double their present dimensions; to erect a church in the centre which shall surpass that of Saint Peter’s or Saint Paul’s; to make the inhabitants the most wealthy and healthy, the best and most contented people on the face of the globe. ”

“ What city in Europe can boast of charitable foundations more splendidly endowed than those of Amsterdam? Its institution [1] for the increase of knowledge and the encouragement of the fine arts is yet in its infancy, but its utility has already been proved, and in a few years it may vie with the oldest established and most opulent societies in Europe.
During our stay at Amsterdam, we crossed the Y, to visit the pleasant villages of Broek and Saardam in North Holland. ”

“ Rotterdam is a merchant city pure and simple, and is exclusively occupied with her own affairs. She has but a small aristocracy, which is neither wealthy nor proud. Amsterdam, on the contrary, holds the flower of the old merchant princes. Amsterdam has great picture-galleries,—she fosters the arts and literature ”

“ They lean forward, and lean backward; they lean to the right, and lean to the left ― conveying the impression to an unfamiliar eye that the only reason they do not tumble down is that they haven't made up their mind which way to fall.
Amsterdam - the Amstel I have observed nervous foreigners walking along the edges of the canals, and constantly looking up at the monotonous brick piles, as if expecting to see them momentarily topple over. ”

“ The principal causes which contributed to render Amsterdam so rich before the two last wars, were the invincible industry, the caution, and frugality of the people. The ancient merchants of Amsterdam preferred small gains with little risk, to less probable, and to larger profits: it was their creed, that more fortunes were raised by saving and economy, with moderate advantages, than by bold, expensive, and perilous speculations. ”