BEAUTIFUL HOLLAND. THE DUTCHMAN'L BIJOW OF A COUNTRY, NOT DAMP AND UNPLEASANT.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1806, 2 February 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

BEAUTIFUL HOLLAND. THE DUTCHMAN'L BIJOW OF A COUNTRY, NOT DAMP AND UNPLEASANT.

Thoughtless persons, who have been little awajr from home, arc apt to have dimly floating in what they are pleased -to call their minds a notion that Holland is a damp, unpleasant country, where the overfed inhabitants grow tnlipa in defiance of inhospitable nature, and where life is a perpetual struggle against roaring waters, momentarily threatening to engulf the fields and villages. I know the French, who are prone to imagine that the world ends at their frontiers, expressed much surprise when told by those who

returned from the inauguration of the exhibition at Amsterdam that Holland was a " little jewel." And so it is— a right little — tight little bijou of a country — odd and original as possible, yet picturesque and charming in highest degree. No sooner does the traveller leave behind him the Flemish land at Kosendaal—inspiring name— and enters upon the fat plains than the enchantment begins. It is a mistake to suppose that mountains are indispensable to pioturesquenesg. No Hollander would allow you to say that tke physical features of his nativo land lack majesty, simply because they have no Zermatte and Grindelwalds. The vast plains, with their bending grasses, over which masses of shadow and floods of light are perpetually playing . hide and seek ; the willows pensive beside the canals ; and theao silent waterways themselves, with their miniatuie fleets of sail boats and ponderous barges laden with hay or iron bound casks of beer and wine ; the red-roofed villages, with their long streets bordered with pretty treeß ; the meadows in which the mottled cows are lying lazily, ready far the limning pencil of some new genius, and seeming to know that they " compose " beautifully for a painting; and the great arms of the sea, which take menacing hold on the green prairies— all these things have a certain grandeur of their own, and one which is admirably combined with beauty. Holland is in its prime in June. The Lusts in Busts are in their perfection then. What delicious retreats from the bustling world are here to be, found beside the broad and smoothly flowing Maas, or in this tree- embowered Hague, with its parks and gardens even in the busießt streets, or northward, around Amsterdam — at Barmen — and a hundred similar places 1 There is a fund of reserve in the Dutch character which impels each proprietor to hedge and ditch himself round about, and, in short, to do his best to shut you out from the view of his villa, which is usually small, but exquisitely painted without and luxuriously furnished within. All over Holland one is perpetually catching momentary glimpses of these sylvan bowers — these " basky dells," wheie the hermit contemplation lores to sit over a fragrant pipe and a still more odorous glass of " schnapps." One gets the impression of solid wealth everywhere in this diminutive land, and is at first inclined to wonder whence the riches come. But after he has seen the lines of stately ships crowding along the quays at Kotterdam, and has peeped into the colonial department of a Dutch daily newspaper and got some small idea of the great movement of affairs in Batavia — after one has heard the Amsterdam bankers talk a trifle concerning their investments in a dozen countries, he begins to understand that thia people gets its money by adventuring abroad, at the same time that it neglects none of its intersts *at home. — Ilaquc CW. BoUon Journal.