Holland

“ That house gave me a better idea of Holland than I could get from any book. It was at once the cause and the effect of the family affection, the modest desires, the independent character of the Dutch people. In my own country the real home does not exist; there is nothing but an apartment, a portion of a great barrack, in which one lives concealed, but not alone, hearing a thousand noises of strange people, who disturb our grief with echoes of their joy, or our joy with rumours of their grief. ”

“ Holland is as wonderful today as it was when, more than twenty years ago, Hans and Gretel skated on the frozen Y. In fact, more wonderful, for every day increases the marvel of its not being washed away by the sea. Its cities have grown, and some of its peculiarities have been washed away by contact with other nations; but it is Holland still, and always will be—full of oddity, courage and industry—the pluckiest little country on earth. ”

“ Holland, indeed, compared to other countries, is like a cabinet-picture by one of its native artists. It is wonderfully exact, highly finished, thoroughly worked up ― nothing left to be done that labor can supply. Go where you will, the canals and barges, windmills and quaint gable-ended houses, the tree-planted quays, and comfortable but stolid-looking people, follow you remorselessly. Be you in Delft, Leyden, Enkhuysen, or Nimeguen, it is much the same. ”

“ To Holland, as a nation, belongs eminently the character of practical. Whilst other nations left uncultivated as they found them, or rendered unproductive, the most fertile territories, seemingly unable to turn them to account, the country and people to which you belong compelled the ocean to retire from a barren, unprofitable, and untillable soil, which they converted into a garden; and if ever the great problem of rendering the whole earth habitable for man be solved, I may venture to predict—with all due respect for other nations and other races—that the solution must come from Holland. ”

“ It has been justly said that he makes use of landscape to express his own bitterness and weariness, his own dreams, and that he contemplates his country with a sort of sadness, and creates groves of trees in which to hide it. The veiled light of Holland is the image of his soul; no one feels more exquisitely its melancholy sweetness; no one represents like him, with a ray of languid light, the sad smile of some afflicted creature. ”

“ Each has its own fascination for travellers. But, after all, the strangest, quaintest, cleanest and most picturesque country in Europe is Holland—little, wet, flat, energetic, heroic Holland. By calling it picturesque I do not mean that nature has made it so. There are no bold cliffs overlooking the sea, no heathery hills reflecting themselves in placid lakes, no soaring mountains, forest-clad or snow-capped, no waterfalls foaming and thundering among the rocks. It is not what nature has done, but what man has done, that makes Holland so picturesque. ”

“ It is no longer the grand Holland of the eighteenth century, but it is still, next to England, the greatest colonizing state of the world. It has exchanged its former grandeur for a quiet prosperity; commerce has been limited, agriculture has increased; the republican government has lost its form rather than its substance, for a family of patriotic princes, dear to the people, govern peaceably in the midst of the ancient and the newer liberties. In Holland are to be found riches without ostentation, freedom without insolence, taxes without poverty. ”

“ The sun, because of the refraction of light by the mists which always fill the air in Holland, is greatly magnified, and diffuses through the clouds and on the sea a veiled and tremulous splendor like the reflection of a great fire. It seemed as if another sun had unexpectedly appeared on the horizon, and was setting, never again to show itself on earth. A child might well have believed the words of a poet who said, "In Holland the sun dies," and the most cold-blooded man must have allowed a farewell to escape his lips. ”

“ I didn't want to come to Holland, as it seemed such a terrifying adventure for Nell and me to rush away from England and go darting about in a motor-boat; and so horribly extravagant to spend all the money poor Captain Noble left, in enjoying ourselves for a few weeks. However, it was to be, and there is something about Holland which appeals to me more than I dreamed any country except England could. I loved it almost from the minute we landed; but when you like any person in a foreign place it makes you like the place itself better. ”

“ Here they meet once a year--the stern, ancient city, represented by its sturdy citizens, its fair women, its proud inhabitants, and Holland's youthful Queen, blossoming forth as a symbol of new, fresh life, fresh hope and promise. Here they meet, the sons and daughters of the men and women who never gave way, who saw their immense riches accrue, as their liberties grew, by sheer force of will, by inflexible determination, by dauntless power of purpose ”

“ By the mere surface-seer the Hollander is apt to be misjudged. His rotund, unctuous form, his full, round face, his small, rather sleepy-looking eyes, and his imperturbable manner, make him appear stupid to a person more vivacious and nervous in organization. ”

“ The plains of Holland, which, seen for the first time excite a vague and agreeable sensation of sadness, and present, in their uniformity, a hundred new and admirable effects which divert the fancy, end, however, by producing weariness and ennui even in those who are by nature inclined to understand and enjoy their peculiar form of beauty. There comes a day when the stranger travelling in Holland suddenly feels an irresistible longing for heights to which he may lift his eyes and his thoughts ”

“ Holland was the printing house of Europe, for I believe more books were issued by Dutch publishers in the seventeenth century than by all the rest of Europe put together. Holland supplied the world with the most accomplished jurists, the most painstaking historians, the most skilful physicians, and the most original thinkers in science. There was a prosperous and prolific school of painters in Holland, a most skilful school of engravers, before a single Englishman had attempted either art. ”

“ With a remarkable fertility of literary production, which renders the fact more strange, Holland has not produced, as other small countries have done, a single book which has become European, that is, if we except the works of Spinoza, the one great philosopher of his country, or consider as Dutch literature the forgotten Latin treatises of Erasmus of Rotterdam. And yet if there is a country where nature and events have offered subjects apt to inspire some of those poetic works which strike the imagination of every people, that country is Holland. ”

“ The real home is in Holland—a house of one's own, quite separate from others, modest, circumspect, and, by reason of its retirement, unknown to mysteries and intrigues. When the inhabitants of the house are merry, everything is bright; when they are sad, all is serious. In these houses, with their canals and drawbridges, every modest citizen feels something of the solitary dignity of a feudal lord, and might imagine himself the commander of a fortress or the captain of a ship ”

“ Though Holland was constantly in danger from the ocean, it was from the ocean that she derived her wealth and her means for fighting in the struggle for independence. She chose with reason the symbol which she adopted for her flag—a lion struggling with the waves, and her motto, Luctor et emergo, “I struggle, I rise.”
For a time Philip had been the guardian of his cousin Jacqueline of Holland, and in this capacity he had sworn to maintain the privileges and institutions of the Netherlands. ”

“ There are canals in Holland down which you pass as though a field of wind-blown corn; a soft, low, rustling murmur ever in your ears. It is the ceaseless whirl of the great mill sails. Far out at sea the winds are as foolish savages, fighting, shrieking, tearing—purposeless. Here, in the street of mills, it is a civilized wind, crooning softly while it labours.
What charms one in Holland is the neatness and cleanliness of all about one. Maybe to the Dutchman there are drawbacks. In a Dutch household life must be one long spring-cleaning. ”

“ No historical study could be of greater interest to clubs than that of Holland. The story of the rise of the Dutch Republic is more stirring than any romance. Her army was small, but unconquerable; her navy successfully fought the navies of far greater nations. Her commerce was unrivaled; her colonies were planted in unknown countries; her artists were the greatest of the world at the time. But, most of all, Holland was wonderful for her great struggle for liberty when liberty was unknown, and the effects of her victory were world-wide. ”

“ SPECIMEN OF THE ENGLISH, DUTCH, AND GERMAN LANGUAGES. It is matter of surprise to the contemplative traveller to observe in a country apparently so mechanically moral and regular as Holland, the glaring defects of the most loose and meretricious government: in the hearts of the finest cities are to be found brothels surpassing in iniquity all such seats of impurity in any other nation, in which the horrible novelty of the most savage oppression is united to a public, licensed, and authorised display of vice and profligacy. ”

“ Amidst the political storms which have agitated Holland for so many years, more fatal to its prosperity than those of the ocean, in which it almost appears to float, education has never been neglected: to bestow upon his children decent and useful instruction, has ever formed the anxious care of the Hollander: he feels that whilst he trains their minds to habits of investigation and industry, he secures to them, under any form of government, the sources of support and advancement. ”

“ Holland, more than any region under the sun, illustrates the power of industry and perseverance. It shows, from the first to the last, that to the active hand and steady will nothing is impossible.
Such a land as Holland exists nowhere else. It is not merely the most singular of kingdoms ― it is the only one of its kind. You may travel the world over, and yet be unable to form any conception of the Netherlands. You may live there your life long, and have no adequate idea of the remainder of the globe. Nature is responsible for the planet, but man created Holland ”

“ The history of Holland is a record of the unexpected. One might think that this flat country would have a story as monotonous as the land on which it is built, that it would be the last part of the world to be the center of fierce battles and bloody wars. ”

“ But the list of contemporary Dutch writers is long and brilliant, and the time to speak critically of them must be postponed.
Nothing impresses the visitor to Holland more than the vast dikes or dams which restrain the sea from overwhelming the country. They have to be constantly watched and renewed, and to those unused to the idea of dwelling in the presence of such constant peril, the phlegm of the Hollanders is remarkable. ”

“ Holland is a perennial type of human courage and industry, common sense and moderation. As we contemplate them to-day, it requires an effort of the imagination to picture them as the descendants of a race of heroes who defied and overcame the strongest and most cruel Power on earth in their day, and then taught the rest of Europe how to unite success in commerce with justice and honor. But the heroism is still there, and, should need arise, we need not doubt that it would once more be manifested. ”

“ The stranger will find nothing to detain him in this melancholy town long. In Holland every traveller naturally becomes amphibious: the constant contemplation of so much water quickly engenders all the inclinations of a webfooted animal, and he soon feels out of his proper element when out of a canal. Right merrily did I follow my commissionary and his wheel barrow with my baggage through the whole town, until I reached the Hague gate, when my favourite conveyance, the treckschuyt, was ready to start. ”

“ This aerial concert is repeated every hour of the day and night in all the steeples of Holland, the tunes beings national airs, or from German or Italian operas. Thus in Holland the passing hour sings, as if to distract the mind from sad thoughts of flying time, and its song is of country, faith, and love, floating in harmony above the sordid noises of the earth.
The Hollanders eat a great deal. Their greatest pleasures, as Cardinal Bentivoglio says, are those of the table. Their appetites are voracious, and they care more for quantity than quality. ”

“ The Holland maiden or housewife can sit in her chamber with her knitting or sewing ― to be idle in Holland is deemed the blackest of sins ― without losing precious moments in looking out of the window. ”

“ When you conduct yourself in such a way as to induce the people of Holland to believe that you act under my influence, that all your measures and all your sentiments are conformable with mine, then you will be loved, you will be esteemed, and you will acquire the power requisite for re-establishing Holland: when to be my friend, and the friend of France, shall become a title of favour at your court, Holland will be in her natural situation. ”

“ But let us come to the market, which was the last spectacle of life that I saw in Holland.
Early in the morning I took a turn about the city to see the peasants come in. Every hour arrived a train which brought a crowd of them; by every country road there came brightly-painted wagons, drawn by five black horses, and bringing majestic married couples; by every canal arrived boats with sails, full of produce ”