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something about the police. I followed him to a house where they showed me the first book ever printed; and which is old enough to satisfy the wildest bibliomaniac in the Roxburgh Club.

HAERLEM-GREAT ORGAN-AMSTERDAM.

"I then visited the cathedral, and heard the organ played by Summach, a great performer, and even composer, who makes many hundreds a year by playing to strangers for a guinea an hour-but the hour was worth the guinea, and many guineas. It was listening to the full poetry of music. The instrument has sixty-eight stops, and between four and five thousand pipes. The first piece was the Battle of Prague. I have no words to tell you how it took the heart and passions into the field! The trumpets sounded as over a vast plain, where you saw brigade after brigade extended, with flying colors. The drums beat; you heard the trampling of cavalry-the tread of infantry-the charging-step-the roar of artillery-the shouts of victory-and the Te Deum! It was transporting!

"Then came a second piece-the Shepherdess in the Storm-that told a complete story-airs that imitated the warbling of birds, and the gurgling of waters; with now and then a sweet pastoral pipe that made you imagine some lively spot of scenery, where you could fancy the sun shining delightfully on rocks and waters, glades and trees. After a pause, the music grows mournful, as if the sky began to lower, and thunder is heard at a distance. The human voice, which the organ imitates to deception, begins to grow more and more plaintive; the thunder increases, and such is the power of this organ, that it seems to shake the cathedral, and in fact could not be distinguished from actual peals. Strains of an awful character succeed, with the human voice, at intervals, pleading with Heaven to appease the storm! At last it subsides, and you conceive the shepherdess rescued, and thanking God for her deliverance!

"From Haerlem we proceeded to Amsterdam-flat grassy meadows on either side of a canal that often stretches for miles as straight as a dart, the view now and then crossed by regimental rows of poplars, willows, or limes--branches running off from the main canal-and windmills and spires marking the distance. Till you come to Guelderland, scarce a sand-hill rises above the universal level; but this uniformity of meadows, with lazy cattle, is sometimes relieved by villas coming close to the water's edge, and dropping their shrubbery over the canal. Often, at a distance, you see country-seats moated with water; and this, I was told, is done to drain the little land that can be

made into pleasure-ground-otherwise it would be marshy. In the gardening of those country seats everything is clipt and square; but now and then you see English pleasure-grounds imitated on a dwarfish scale. Altogether, however, there is too much foliage and water about their houses. This is the face of the country. The only animal that surprises you with liveliness is the horse of the Trackschuyt, that trots at the rate of four miles an hour! Every other creature seems half asleep. The cows feed with not a tenth part of the spirit of English cows. The storks sail lazily round your head, with snakes in their beaks, and are seen feeding their young in large nests, on the tops of the cottages, where the peasant reckons their arrival a blessing. The common tradition was, that the storks would not live in Holland under a crowned head; but the King of the Netherlands has been crowned; and the storks, like true Hollanders, take time to consider about removal.

J

"The face of the people is as unromantic as that of their country. The beggars receive your alms, and almost ask it, with indifference. At the Hague, a landlord overcharged me, and I called him a rascal to his face; at Amsterdam another treated me like a lord, and demanded no more than I should have paid at an alehouse in England. I thanked him for his treatment; yet the face of both hosts were perfectly the sameall apathy and impassiveness! I must say, however, that where the Dutch face has expression, that little expression is good." Many of their women are pretty; and I have not seen one woman that I could suppose either a cruel mistress, or a quarrelsome wife. Their cleanliness is above all praise. Their houses are so painted and cleansed that poverty has absolutely no horrors in Holland. On the roads, you see peasants in the dress of the last century. The common people of both sexes wear wooden shoes: the women have ornaments of gold, or gilded metal, hanging like sheep's horns from the sides of their heads and fastened with plates about their brows, under their caps.

"At Amsterdam the pictures of Paul Potter struck me with equal astonishment to what I had felt in the Louvre.* His imitation of animals will bear the examination of à microscope, and even looks more life-like when so examined. On the road to Nimeguen I visited a settlement of Moravians, which was very interesting. On our way hither last night, we witnessed the devastation occasioned by the breaking of the dykes in Holland

* See ante, visit to Paris, September, 1814.

ET. 42.]

when entire villages were destroyed. The trees, in one direction, had been dashed down for miles, by the force of the ice. The scene looked like the relics of the flood. To-morrow I shall proceed to Cologne. T. C."

BONN ON THE RHINE-SCHLEGEL.

*

•

.

"BONN, ON THE RHINE, June 9. I have been a day in Bonn, and I have discovered Schlegel to my great joy; so that I shall not, for the present, proceed to Heidelberg. The difficulty of finding lodgings, and a separate boarding-house for my son, turns out to be greater than I had imagined. Forty professors, and five hundred and fifty students, make lodgings scarce and comparatively dear. I find Welcher, the librarian of the University, a very civil and attentive acquaintance. Schlegel was very happy to see me, and is very obliging; but his trick of lecturing, in conversation, appears to have increased with his appointment. He is ludicrously fond of showing off his English to me-accounting for his fluency and exactness in speaking it by his having learnt it at thirteen. This English, at the same time, is, in point of idiom and pronunciation, what a respectable English parrot would be ashamed of.-I have not got a separate apartment, so that I cannot begin to study; and until I have found a boarding-house for Thomas, and good lodgings, I shall not be settled. "T. C."

109

'BONN, June 19.

"I thought by this time that I should have been able to have sent you an amusing account of the banks of the Rhine, but it has rained incessantly since I came to Bonn. I have not looked at a bright sky, or enjoyed a prospect of the scenery, for ten minutes together. . . . The landscape is certainly magnificent. The moment it clears up, the Seven Mountains appear in great magnificence; and the vineyards and plains, along the course of the river, refresh the eye with luxuriant verdure. Two ruinous castles on the heights at a distance, and divided by the Rhine, give a most romantic effect to the scene. These are the Drachenfels and the Godesberg; but the wretched state of the atmosphere makes it impossible to have any continued enjoyment of the scene; and with all its fine outline, it appears little better than a dull, dark engraving.

"Bonn itself has no object of interest but its University-a fine pile of building, almost worthy of Oxford, and once the pal

ace of the Electoral Princes. The library is a suit of three halls, at least three hundred feet in length. I have daily access to it for several hours, and now write to you from one of its niches, where I can study with perfect tranquillity. Schlegel means to be very kind, and is so attentive as to call upon me every day; but he talks without listening even to questions, and upon subjects on which he has not information to make him edifying. He thinks he understands English politics, and pesters me with his crude speculations about our impending national bankruptcy, and the misery of our lower orders! Yesterday, he asked me if I thought our peasantry happier than the serfs of the feudal system and I asked him, to-day, what was the price of labor in Germany in order to institute a comparison between the situations of the poor in both countries; but my German philosopher was too great a man to know anything about the price of labor, and frankly confessed his ignorance. At times, when he dwells on a subject of which he is really master, he is quite his own original and animating self; but when he has nothing to say he proses away like the clack of a mill when there is no corn to grind. In short, I had no notion that a great man could ever grow so wearisome. It is a pity when learned men forget that one half of the value of conversation depends on reciprocity. One could take down a book from a shelf, ten times more wise or witty than almost any man's conversation. Bacon is wiser, Swift more humorous, than any person one is likely to meet with; but they cannot chime in with the exact frame of thoughts in which we may happen to take them down from our shelves. Therein lies the luxury of conversation; and when a living speaker does not yield us that luxury, he becomes only a book standing on two legs."

"20th. I have been very fortunate in forming an acquaintance with the Greek professor, a man of simple, agreeable manners, and of very respectable erudition. He has published several tracts on the Greek poets, and, what is very pleasant to me, has notions of them congenial with my own. For instance, it is the fashionable opinion in Germany, inculcated by their famous Wolff, that the Iliad was the work of many authors. I made to him a declaration of my creed on the subject; he told me his own was the same, though, when he avowed it at the University of Halle, he was quite stared at as an anti-Wolffian heretic! I have set anew to the study of Hebrew,* and he has lent me some

* Campbell's Lecture on the Poetry of the Hebrews, perhaps the very

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valuable tracts on the poetry of the Bible; a subject which the Germans, for these twenty years past, have studied much more than their own literati."

BONN-PROFESSORS-STUDENTS-COLLEGE.

“22d and 23d.—Dr. Meyer, the Professor of Physics, is married to an English woman; and both, as you may guess, are valuable acquaintances. The Professor of English, Mr. Strahl, assists me in German, in return for my correcting his pronunciation of our language; he reads to me out of a book entitled 'Beauties of British Literature,' containing pieces by Walter Scott, Byron, and the entire works of a gentleman of whom you may have sometimes heard. This is not the only German edition of his rhymes; another has appeared at Leipsic . . . The appearance of the students is certainly not so gentlemanlike as that of the Oxonians, yet it is singularly picturesque. For some years past, a rage for reviving ancient costume has arisen, connected with a patriotic spirit in favor of the union and independence of Germany. The old German dress is therefore the favorite one-a simple tunic or capote buttoned before, with the collar of the shirt spread at the neck, a velvet cap, wide trousers, moustachios, and sometimes a beard, make their figures look like live pictures of the fifteenth century. Many of them carry about long pipes like fishing-rods ... Occasionally you see fine forms and faces, and the effect of their costume is very fine."

"24th.--Last night I was at a ball given by the students, where the dresses were, in many instances, quite fit for the stage. I was in general struck by the height and beauty of the men, but equally astonished to remark the ill-favored appearance and small stature of the women. There was but one passable beauty among fifty. The only fine woman in the place was a Jewess, and, singular enough to say, my landlord's niece. Schlegel swears she is a Jessica! Well-seeing a very elegant young woman waltzing with the handsomest young man in the room -I could hardly believe my own eyes that it was the girl who, in the morning, had made my bed; yet her partner was a youth of good family, and two princes were waltzing beside her. The truth is, the Jews are treated with entire liberality in Bonn ; and there is, from causes which I cannot pretend to trace, something like a republican equality among the Bourgeoisie. The Viceroy of the University asked me how I liked a dance that was set up by the name of Ecossaise,' a most woful imitation of Scotch

best of the series, was re-written, and greatly enriched, after his return from Germany.