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Title: Sketches in Holland and Scandinavia

Author: Augustus J. C. Hare

Release date: June 15, 2020 [eBook #62403]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Fiona Holmes, MFR and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Produced by Fiona Holmes, MFR and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)






Transcriber's Notes.

The few instances of inconsistent hyphenation have been retained.
Page 100 — Changed Lubeck to Lübeck.


    SKETCHES
    IN
    HOLLAND AND SCANDINAVIA

    BY
    AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE
    AUTHOR OF "CITIES OF ITALY," "WANDERINGS IN SPAIN," ETC.

    LONDON
    GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD

    LONDON
    SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
    1885

    [_All rights reserved_]




PREFACE.


The slight sketches in this volume are only the result of ordinary
tours in the countries they attempt to describe. Yet the days they
recall were so delightful, and their memory—especially of the tour
in Norway—is so indescribably sunny, that I cannot help hoping their
publication may lead others to enjoy what is at once so pleasant and so
easy of attainment.

  AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.

  HOLMHURST: _November 1884_.




CONTENTS.


                PAGE

    IN HOLLAND     1

    IN DENMARK    59

    IN SWEDEN     83

    IN NORWAY    105




_IN HOLLAND._


At Roosendal, about an hour's railway journey from Antwerp, the
boundary between Belgium and Holland is crossed, and a branch line
diverges to Breda.

Somehow, like most travellers, we could not help expecting to see some
marked change on reaching a new country, and in Holland one could not
repress the expectation of beginning at once to see the pictures of
Teniers and Gerard Dou in real life. We were certainly disappointed at
first. Open heaths were succeeded by woods of stunted firs, and then by
fields with thick hedges of beech or alder, till the towers of Breda
came in sight. Here a commonplace omnibus took us to the comfortable
inn of Zum Kroon, and we were shown into bedrooms reached by an open
wooden staircase from the courtyard, and quickly joined the table
d'hôte, at which the magnates of the town were seated with napkins well
tucked up under their chins, talking, with full mouths, in Dutch, of
which to our unaccustomed ears the words seemed all in one string.
Most excellent was the dinner—roast meat and pears, quantities of
delicious vegetables cooked in different ways, piles of ripe mulberries
and cake, and across the little garden, with its statues and bright
flower-beds, we could see the red sails of the barges going up and down
the canals.

As soon as dinner was over, we sallied forth to see the town, which
impressed us more than any Dutch city did afterwards, perhaps because
it was the first we saw. The winding streets—one of them ending in a
high windmill—are lined with houses wonderfully varied in outline,
and of every shade of delicate colour, yellow, grey, or brown, though
the windows always have white frames and bars. Passing through a low
archway under one of the houses, we found ourselves, when we least
expected it, in the public garden, a kind of wood where the trees have
killed all the grass, surrounded by canals, beyond one of which is a
great square château built by William III. of England, encircled by the
Merk, and enclosing an arcaded court. There was an older château of
1350 at Breda, but we failed to find it.

[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE AT BREDA.]

In stately splendour, from the old houses of the market-place, rises
the noble Hervormde Kerk (Protestant Church), with a lofty octagon
tower, and a most characteristic bulbous Dutch spire. Here, as we
wanted to see the interior, we first were puzzled by our ignorance of
Dutch, finding, as everywhere in the smaller towns, that the natives
knew no language but their own. But two old women in high caps and
gold earrings observed our puzzledom from a window and pointed to a
man and a key—we nodded; the man pointed to himself, a door, and
a key—we nodded; and we were soon inside the building. It was our
first introduction to Dutch Calvinism and iconoclasm, and piteous
indeed was it to see so magnificent a church thickly covered with
whitewash, and the quantity of statues which it contains of deceased
Dukes and Duchesses of Nassau bereft of their legs and petticoats.
Only, in a grand side chapel on the left of the choir, the noble tomb
of Engelbrecht II. of Nassau, general under the Emperor Maximilian
(1505), remains intact. The guide lights matches to shine through the
transparent alabaster of the figures; that of the Duke represents
Death, that of the Duchess Sleep, as they lie beneath a stone slab
which bears the armour of Engelbrecht, and is supported by figures
of Cæsar, Hannibal, Regulus, and Philip of Macedon; that of Cæsar is
sublime. The tomb of Sir Francis Vere in Westminster Abbey is of the
same design, and is supposed to be copied from this famous monument.
Outside the chapel is the tomb of Engelbrecht V. of Nassau, with all
his family kneeling, in quaint headdresses. The other sights of the
church are the brass font in the Baptistery, and a noble brass in the
choir of William de Gaellen, Dean of the Chapter, 1539. It will be
observed that here, and almost everywhere else in Holland, the names
of saints which used to be attached to the churches have disappeared;
the buildings are generally known as the old church, or new church, or
great church.

After a delicious breakfast of coffee and thick cream, with rusks,
scones, and different kinds of cheese, always an indispensable in Dutch
breakfasts, we took to the railway again and crossed Zealand, which
chiefly consists of four islands, Noordt Beveland, Zuid Beveland,
Schouwen, and Walcheren, and is less visited by the rest of the
Netherlanders than any other part of the country. The land is all
cut up into vast polders, as the huge meadows are called, which are
recovered from the sea and protected by embankments. Here, if human
care was withdrawn for six months, the whole country would be under the
sea again. A corps of engineers called 'waterstaat' are continually
employed to watch the waters, and to keep in constant repair the dykes,
which are formed of clay at the bottom, as that is more waterproof
than anything else, and thatched with willows, which are here grown
extensively for the purpose. If the sea passes a dyke, ruin is
imminent, an alarm bell rings, and the whole population rush to the
rescue. The moment one dyke is even menaced, the people begin to build
another inside it, and then rely upon the double defence, whilst they
fortify the old one. But all their care has not preserved the islands
of Zealand. Three centuries ago, Schouwen was entirely submerged, and
every living creature was drowned. Soon after, Noordt Beveland was
submerged, and remained for several years entirely under water, only
the points of the church spires being visible. Zuid Beveland had been
submerged in the fourteenth century. Walcheren was submerged as late as
1808, and Tholen even in 1825. It has been aptly asserted that the sea
to the inhabitants of Holland is what Vesuvius is to Torre del Greco.
How well its French name of Pays-Bas suits the country! De Amicis says
that the Dutch have three enemies—the sea, the lakes, and the rivers;
they repel the sea, they dry the lakes, and they imprison the rivers;
but with the sea it is a combat which never ceases.

[Illustration: BERGEN-OP-ZOOM.]

The story of the famous siege of 1749 made us linger at Bergen-op-Zoom,
a clean, dull little town with bright white houses surrounding an
irregular market-place, and surmounted by the heavy tower of the Church
of S. Gertrude. In the Stadhuis is a fine carved stone chimney-piece;
but there is little worth seeing, and we were soon speeding across
the rich pastures of Zuid Beveland, and passing its capital of Goes,
prettily situated amongst cherry orchards, the beautiful cruciform
church with a low central spire rising above the trees on its ramparts.
Every now and then the train seems scarcely out of the water, which
covers a vast surface of the pink-green flats, and recalls the
description in Hudibras of—

    A country that draws fifty feet of water,
    In which men live as in the hold of nature,
    And when the sea does in upon them break,
    And drown a province, does but spring a leak.

The peasant women at the stations are a perpetual amusement, for there
is far more costume here than in most parts of Holland, and peculiar
square handsome gold ornaments, something like closed golden books, are
universally worn on each side of the face.

So, crossing a broad salt canal into the island of Walcheren, we
reached Middleburg, a handsome town which was covered with water to the
house tops when the island was submerged. It was the birthplace of
Zach Janssen and Hans Lipperhey, the inventors of the telescope, _c._
1610. In the market-place is a most beautiful Gothic townhall, built
by the architect Keldermans, early in the sixteenth century. We asked
a well dressed boy how we could get into it, and he, without further
troubling himself, pointed the way with his finger. The building
contains a quaint old hall called the Vierschaar, and a so-called
museum, but there is little enough to see. As we came out the boy met
us. 'You must give me something: I pointed out the entrance of the
Stadhuis to you.' In Holland we have always found that no one, rich or
poor, does a kindness or even a civility for nothing!

The crowd in the market-place was so great that it was impossible to
sketch the Stadhuis as we should have wished, but the people themselves
were delightfully picturesque. The women entirely conceal their hair
under their white caps, but have golden corkscrews sticking out on
either side the face, like weapons of defence, from which the golden
slabs we have observed before were pendant. The Nieuwe Kerk is of
little interest, though it contains the tomb of William of Holland, who
was elected Emperor of Germany in 1250, and we wandered on through the
quiet streets, till a Gothic arch in an ancient wall looked tempting.
Passing through it we found ourselves in the enclosure of the old
abbey, shaded by a grove of trees, and surrounded by ancient buildings,
part of which are appropriated as the Hotel Abdij, where we arrived
utterly famished, and found a table d'hôte at 2.30 P.M. unspeakably
reviving.

Any one who sees Holland thoroughly ought also to visit Zieriksee, the
capital of the island of Schouwen; but the water locomotion thither is
so difficult and tedious that we preferred keeping to the railways,
which took us back in the dark over the country we had already
traversed, and a little more, to Dortrecht, where there is a convenient
tramway to take travellers from the station into the town. Here, at the
Hôtel de Fries, we found comfortable bedrooms, with boarded floors and
box-beds like those in Northumbrian cottages, and we had supper in the
public room, separated into two parts by a daïs for strangers, whence
we looked down into the humbler division, which recalled many homely
scenes of Ostade and Teniers in its painted wooden ceiling, its bright,
polished furniture, its cat and dog and quantity of birds and flowers,
its groups of boors at round tables drinking out of tankards, and the
landlady and her daughter in their gleaming gold ornaments, sitting
knitting, with the waiter standing behind them amusing himself by the
general conversation.

Our morning at Dortrecht was very delightful, and it is a thoroughly
charming place. Passing under a dark archway in a picturesque building
of Charles V. opposite the hotel, we found ourselves at once on the
edge of an immense expanse of shimmering river, with long rich polders
beyond, between which the wide flood breaks into three different
branches. Red and white sails flit down them. Here and there rise a
line of pollard willows or clipped elms, and now and then a church
spire. On the nearest shore an ancient windmill, coloured in delicate
tints of grey and yellow, surmounts a group of white buildings. On the
left is a broad esplanade of brick, lined with ancient houses, and a
canal with a bridge, the long arms of which are ready to open at a
touch and give a passage to the great yellow-masted barges, which are
already half intercepting the bright red house-fronts ornamented with
stone, which belong to some public buildings facing the end of the
canal. With what a confusion of merchandise are the boats laden, and
how gay is the colouring, between the old weedy posts to which they are
moored!

It was from hence that Isabella of France, with Sir John de Hainault
and many other faithful knights, set out on their expedition against
Edward II. and the government of the Spencers.

From the busy port, where nevertheless they are dredging, we cross
another bridge and find ourselves in a quietude like that of a
cathedral close in England. On one side is a wide pool half covered
with floating timber, and, in the other half, reflecting like a mirror
the houses on the opposite shore, with their bright gardens of lilies
and hollyhocks, and trees of mountain ash, which bend their masses
of scarlet berries to the still water. Between the houses are glints
of blue river and of inevitable windmills on the opposite shore. And
all this we observe standing in the shadow of a huge church, the
Groote Kerk, with a nave of the fourteenth century, and a choir of
the fifteenth, and a gigantic brick tower, in which three long Gothic
arches, between octagonal tourelles, enclose several tiers of windows.
At the top is a great clock, and below the church a grove of elms,
through which fitful sunlight falls on the grass and the dead red of
the brick pavement (so grateful to feet sore with the sharp stones of
other Dutch cities), where groups of fishermen are collecting in their
blue shirts and white trousers.

[Illustration: GROOTE KERK, DORTRECHT.]

There is little to see inside this or any other church in Holland;
travellers will rather seek for the memorials, at the Kloveniers
Doelen, of the famous Synod of Dort, which was held 1618-19, in the
hope of effecting a compromise between the Gomarists, or disciples of
Calvin, and the Arminians who followed Zwingli, and who had recently
obtained the name of Remonstrants from the 'remonstrance' which they
had addressed eight years before in defence of their doctrines. The
Calvinists held that the greater part of mankind was excluded from
grace, which the Arminians denied; but at the Synod of Dort the
Calvinists proclaimed themselves as infallible as the Pope, and their
resolutions became the law of the Dutch reformed Church. The Arminians
were forthwith outlawed; a hundred ministers who refused to subscribe
to the dictates of the Synod were banished; Hugo Grotius and Rombout
Hoogerbeets were imprisoned for life at Loevestein; the body of the
secretary Ledenberg, who committed suicide in prison, was hung; and Van
Olden Barneveldt, the friend of William the Silent, was beheaded in his
seventy-second year.

[Illustration: CANAL AT DORTRECHT.]

There is nothing in the quiet streets of Dortrecht to remind one that
it was once one of the most important commercial cities of Holland,
taking precedence even of Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, and Amsterdam. It
also possessed a privilege called the Staple of Dort, by which all the
carriers on the Maas and Rhine were forced to unload their merchandise
here, and pay all duties imposed, only using the boats or porters of
the place in their work, and so bringing a great revenue to the town.

More than those in any of the other towns of Holland do the little
water streets of Dortrecht recall Venice, the houses rising abruptly
from the canals; only the luminous atmosphere and the shimmering water
changing colour like a chameleon, are wanting.

Through the street of wine—Wijnstraat—built over storehouses used for
the staple, we went to the Museum to see the pictures. There were two
schools of Dortrecht. Jacob Geritse Cuyp (1575), Albert Cuyp (1605),
Ferdinand Bol (1611), Nicolas Maas (1632), and Schalken (1643) belonged
to the former; Arend de Gelder, Arnold Houbraken, Dirk Stoop, and Ary
Scheffer are of the latter. Sunshine and glow were the characteristics
of the first school, greyness and sobriety of the second. But there
are few good pictures at Dort now, and some of the best works of
Cuyp are to be found in our National Gallery, executed at his native
place and portraying the great brick tower of the church in the golden
haze of evening, seen across rich pastures, where the cows are lying
deep in the meadow grass. The works of Ary Scheffer are now the most
interesting pictures in the Dortrecht Gallery. Of the subject 'Christus
Consolator' there are two representations. In the more striking of
these the pale Christ is seated amongst the sick, sorrowful, blind,
maimed, and enslaved, who are all stretching out their hands to Him.
Beneath is the tomb which the artist executed for his mother, Cornelia
Scheffer, whose touching figure is represented lying with outstretched
hands, in the utmost abandonment of repose.

An excursion should be made from Dortrecht to the castle of Loevestein
on the Rhine, where Grotius, imprisoned in 1619, was concealed by his
wife in the chest which brought in his books and linen. It was conveyed
safely out of the castle by her courageous maid Elsje van Houwening,
and was taken at first to the house of Jacob Daatselaer, a supposed
friend of Grotius, who refused to render any assistance. But his wife
consented to open the chest, and the philosopher, disguised as a mason,
escaped to Brabant.

It is much best to visit Rotterdam as an excursion from Dortrecht. We
thought it the most odious place we ever were in—immense, filthy, and
not very picturesque. Its handsomest feature is the vast quay called
the Boompjes, on the Maas. Here and there a great windmill reminds you
unmistakably of where you are, and the land streets are intersected
everywhere by water streets, the carriages being constantly stopped
to let ships pass through the bridges. In the Groote Markt stands a
bronze statue of Desiderius Erasmus—'Vir saeculi sui primarius, et
civis omnium praestantissimus,' which is the work of Hendrik de Keyser
(1662), and in the Wijde Kerkstraat is the house where he was born,
inscribed 'Haec est parva domus, magnus qua natus Erasmus, 1467,' but
it is now a tavern. The great church of S. Lawrence—Groote Kerk—built
in 1477-87, contains the tombs of a number of Dutch admirals, and has
a grand pavement of monumental slabs, but is otherwise frightful. The
portion used for service is said to be 'so conveniently constructed
that the zealous Christians of Rotterdam prefer sleeping through a
sermon there, to any other church in the city.' Part of the rest is
used as a cart-house, the largest chapel is a commodious carpenter's
shop, and the aisles round the part which is still a church, where
there has been an attempt at restoration in painting the roof yellow
and putting up some hideous yellow seats, are a playground for the
children of the town, who are freely admitted in their perambulators,
though for strangers there is a separate fee for each part of the
edifice they enter.

We went to see the pictures in the Museum bequeathed to the town by
Jacob Otto Boyman, but did not admire them much. It takes time to
accustom one's mind to Dutch art, and the endless representations
of family life, with domestic furniture, pots and pans, &c., or of
the simple local landscapes—clipped avenues, sandy roads, dykes,
and cottages, or even of the cows, and pigs, and poultry, which seem
wonderfully executed, but, where one has too much of the originals,
scarcely worth the immense amount of time and labour bestowed upon
them. The calm seas of Van de Welde and Van der Capelle only afford
a certain amount of relief. The scenes of village life are seldom
pleasing, often coarse, and never have anything elevating to offer or
ennobling to recall. We thought that the real charm of the Dutch school
to outsiders consists in the immense power and variety of its portraits.

Hating Rotterdam, we thankfully felt ourselves speeding over the flat,
rich lands to Gouda, where we found an agricultural fête going on,
banners half way down the houses, and a triumphal arch as the entrance
to the square, formed of spades, rakes, and forks, with a plough at
the top, and decorated with corn, potatoes, turnips, and carrots, and
cornucopias pouring out flowers at the sides. In the square—a great
cheese market, for the Gouda cheese is esteemed the best in Holland—is
a Gothic Stadhuis, and beyond it, the Groote Kerk of 1552, of which the
bare interior is enlivened by the stained windows executed by Wonter
and Dirk Crabeth in 1555-57. We were the better able to understand
the design of these noble windows because the cartoon for each was
spread upon the pavement in front of it; but one could not help one's
attention being unpleasantly distracted by the number of men of the
burgher class, smoking and with their hats on, who were allowed to use
the church as a promenade. Gouda also made an unpleasant impression
upon us, because, expensive as we found every hotel in Holland, we were
nowhere so outrageously cheated as here.

[Illustration: THE VIJVER.]

It is a brief journey to the Hague—La Haye, Gravenhage—most
delightful of little capitals, with its comfortable hotels and pleasant
surroundings. The town is still so small that it seems to merit the
name of 'the largest village in Europe,' which was given to it because
the jealousy of other towns prevented its having any vote in the States
General till the time of Louis Bonaparte, who gave it the privileges
of a city. It is said that the Hague, more than any other place, may
recall what Versailles was just before the great revolution. It has
thoroughly the aspect of a little royal city. Without any of the crowd
and bustle of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, it is not dead like the smaller
towns of Holland; indeed, it even seems to have a quiet gaiety, without
dissipation, of its own. All around are parks and gardens, whence wide
streets lead speedily through the new town of the rich bourgeoisie
to the old central town of stadholders, where a beautiful lake, the
Vijver, or fish-pond, comes as a surprise, with the eccentric old
palace of the Binnenhof rising straight out of its waters. We had been
told it was picturesque, but were prepared for nothing so charming
as the variety of steep roofs and towers, the clear reflections, the
tufted islet, and the beautiful colouring of the whole scene of the
Vijver. Skirting the lake, we entered the precincts of the palace
through the picturesque Gudevangen Poort, where Cornelius de Witte,
Burgomaster of Dort, was imprisoned in 1672, on a false accusation of
having suborned the surgeon William Tichelaur to murder the Prince of
Orange. He was dragged out hence and torn to pieces by the people,
together with his brother Jean de Witte, Grand Pensioner, whose house
remains hard by in the Kneuterdijk.

The court of the Binnenhof is exceedingly handsome, and contains the
ancient Gothic Hall of the Knights, where Johann van Olden Barneveld,
Grand Pensioner, or Prime Minister, was condemned to death 'for having
conspired to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly
troubled God's Church,' and in the front of which (May 24, 1619) he was
beheaded.

[Illustration: HALL OF THE KNIGHTS, THE HAGUE.]

Close to the north-east gate of the Binnenhof is the handsome house
called Mauritshuis, containing the inestimable Picture Gallery of the
Hague, which will bear many visits, and has the great charm of not
being huge beyond the powers of endurance. On the ground floor are
chiefly portraits, amongst which a simple dignified priest by Philippe
de Champaigne, with a far-away expression, will certainly arrest
attention. Deeply interesting is the portrait by Ravesteyn of William
the Silent, in his ruff and steel armour embossed with gold—a deeply
lined face, with a slight peaked beard. His widow, Louise de Coligny,
is also represented. There is a fine portrait by Schalcken of our
William the Third. Noble likenesses of Sir George Sheffield and his
wife Anna Wake, by Vandyke, are a pleasing contrast to the many works
of Rubens. There are deeply interesting portraits by Albert Dürer and
Holbein.

On the first floor we must sit down before the great picture which
Rembrandt painted in his twenty-sixth year (1632) of the School of
Anatomy. Here the shrewd professor, Nicholaus Tulp, with a face
brimming with knowledge and intelligence, is expounding the anatomy of
a corpse to a number of members of the guild of surgeons, some of whom
are full of eager interest and inquiry, whilst others are inattentive:
the dead figure is greatly foreshortened and not repulsive. In another
room, a fine work of Thomas de Keyser represents the Four Burgomasters
of Amsterdam hearing of the arrival of Marie de Medicis. A beautiful
work of Adrian van Ostade is full of light and character—but only
represents a stolid boor drinking to the health of a fiddler, while a
child plays with a dog in the background.

A group of admirers will always be found round 'the Immortal Bull' of
Paul Potter, which was considered the fourth picture in importance
in the Louvre, when the spoils of Europe were collected at Paris.
De Amicis says, 'It lives, it breathes; with his bull Paul Potter
has written the true Idyl of Holland.' It is, however—being really
a group of cattle—not a pleasing, though a life-like picture. Much
more attractive is the exquisite 'Presentation' of Rembrandt (1631),
in which Joseph and Mary, simple peasants, present the Holy Child to
Simeon, a glorious old man in a jewelled robe, who invokes a blessing
upon the infant, while other priests look on with interest. A wonderful
ray of light, falling upon the principal group, illuminates the whole
temple. Perhaps the most beautiful work in the whole gallery is the
Young Housekeeper of Gerard Dou. A lovely young woman sits at work by
an open window looking into a street. By her side is the baby asleep
in its cradle, over which the maid is leaning. The light falls on the
chandelier and all the household belongings of a well-to-do citizen: in
all there is the same marvellous finish; it is said that the handle of
the broom took three days to paint.

There is not much to discover in the streets of the Hague. In the great
square called the Plein is the statue of William the Silent, with his
finger raised, erected in 1848 'by the grateful people to the father of
their fatherland.' In the fish-market, tame storks are kept, for the
same reason that bears are kept at Berne, because storks are the arms
of the town. But the chief attraction of the place lies in its lovely
walks amid the noble beeches and oaks of the Bosch, beyond which on the
left is Huis ten Bosch, the Petit Trianon of the Hague, the favourite
palace of Queen Sophie, who held her literary court and died there.
It is a quiet country house, looking out upon flats, with dykes and a
windmill. All travellers seem to visit it,—which must be a ceaseless
surprise to the extortionate custode to whom they have to pay a gulden
a head, and who will hurry them rapidly through some commonplace rooms
in which there is nothing really worth seeing. One room is covered with
paintings of the Rubens school, amid which, high in the dome, is a
portrait of the Princess Amalia of Solms, who built the house in 1647.

[Illustration: SCHEVENINGEN.]

A tram takes people for twopence halfpenny to Scheveningen through the
park, a thick wood with charming forest scenery. As the trees become
more scattered, the roar of the North Sea is heard upon the shore.
Above the sands, on the dunes or sand-hills, which extend from the
Helder to Dunkirk, is a broad terrace, lined on one side by a row of
wooden pavilions with flags and porticoes, and below it are long lines
of tents, necessary in the intense glare, while, nearer the waves, are
thousands of beehive-like refuges, with a single figure seated in each.
The flat monotonous shore would soon pall upon one, yet through the
whole summer it is an extraordinary lively scene. The placid happiness
of Dutch family life has here taken possession. On Sunday afternoons,
especially, the sands seem as crowded with human existence as they are
represented in the picture of Lingelbach, which we have seen in the
Mauritshuis, portraying the vast multitude assembled here to witness
the embarkation of Charles II. for England.

An excursion must be made to Delft, only twenty minutes distant from
the Hague by rail. Pepys calls it 'a most sweet town, with bridges and
a river in every street,' and that is a tolerably accurate description.
It seems thinly inhabited, and the Dutch themselves look upon it as a
place where one will die of _ennui_. It has scarcely changed with two
hundred years. The view of Delft by Van der Meer in the Museum at the
Hague might have been painted yesterday. All the trees are clipped,
for in artificial Holland every work of Nature is artificialised. At
certain seasons, numbers of storks may be seen upon the chimney-tops,
for Delft is supposed to be the stork town _par excellence_. Near
the shady canal Oude Delft is a low building, once the Convent of S.
Agata, with an ornamented door surmounted by a relief, leading into a
courtyard. It is a common barrack now, for Holland, which has no local
histories, has no regard whatever for its historic associations or
monuments. Yet this is the greatest shrine of Dutch history, for it is
here that William the Silent died.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO S. AGATA, DELFT.]

Philip II. had promised 25,000 crowns of gold to any one who would
murder the Prince of Orange. An attempt had already been made, but had
failed, and William refused to take any measures for self-protection,
saying, 'It is useless: my years are in the hands of God: if there is
a wretch who has no fear of death, my life is in his hand, however I
may guard it.' At length, a young man of seven-and-twenty appeared
at Delft, who gave himself out to be one Guyon, a Protestant, son of
Pierre Guyon, executed at Besançon for having embraced Calvinism, and
declared that he was exiled for his religion. Really he was Balthazar
Gerard, a bigoted Catholic, but his conduct in Holland soon procured
him the reputation of an evangelical saint. The Prince took him into
his service and sent him to accompany a mission from the States of
Holland to the Court of France, whence he returned to bring the news
of the death of the Duke of Anjou to William. At that time the Prince
was living with his court in the convent of S. Agata, where he received
Balthazar alone in his chamber. The moment was opportune, but the
would-be assassin had no arms ready. William gave him a small sum of
money and bade him hold himself in readiness to be sent back to France.
With the money Balthazar bought two pistols from a soldier (who
afterwards killed himself when he heard the use which was made of the
purchase). On the next day, June 10, 1584, Balthazar returned to the
convent as William was descending the staircase to dinner, with his
fourth wife, Louise de Coligny (daughter of the Admiral who fell in the
massacre of S. Bartholomew), on his arm. He presented his passport and
begged the Prince to sign it, but was told to return later. At dinner
the Princess asked William who was the young man who had spoken to him,
for his expression was the most terrible she had ever seen. The Prince
laughed, said it was Guyon, and was as gay as usual. Dinner being over,
the family party were about to remount the staircase. The assassin was
waiting in a dark corner at the foot of the stairs, and as William
passed he discharged a pistol with three balls and fled. The Prince
staggered, saying, 'I am wounded; God have mercy upon me and my poor
people.' His sister Catherine van Schwartzbourg asked, 'Do you trust in
Jesus Christ?' He said, 'Yes,' with a feeble voice, sat down upon the
stairs, and died.

Balthazar reached the rampart of the town in safety, hoping to swim
to the other side of the moat, where a horse awaited him. But he had
dropped his hat and his second pistol in his flight, and so he was
traced and seized before he could leap from the wall. Amid horrible
tortures, he not only confessed, but continued to triumph in his crime.
His judges believed him to be possessed of the devil. The next day he
was executed. His right hand was burnt off in a tube of red-hot iron:
the flesh of his arms and legs was torn off with red-hot pincers; but
he never made a cry. It was not till his breast was cut open, and his
heart torn out and flung in his face, that he expired. His head was
then fixed on a pike, and his body cut into four quarters, exposed on
the four gates of the town.

Close to the Prinsenhof is the Oude Kerk with a leaning tower. It
is arranged like a very ugly theatre inside, but contains, with
other tombs of celebrities, the monument of Admiral van Tromp,
1650—'Martinus Harberti Trompius'—whose effigy lies upon his back,
with swollen feet. It was this Van Tromp who defeated the English
fleet under Blake, and perished, as represented on the monument, in an
engagement off Scheveningen. It was he who, after his victory over the
English, caused a broom to be hoisted at his mast-head to typify that
he had swept the Channel clear of his enemies.

The Nieuwe Kerk in the Groote Markt (1412-76) contains the magnificent
monument of William the Silent by Hendrik de Keyser and A. Quellin
(1621). Black marble columns support a white canopy over the white
sleeping figure of the Prince, who is represented in his little black
silk cap, as he is familiar to us in his pictures. In the recesses of
the tomb—'_somptueux et tourmenté_,' as Montégut calls it—are statues
of Liberty, Justice, Prudence, and Religion. At the feet of William
lies his favourite dog, which saved his life from midnight assassins at
Malines, by awakening him. At the head of the tomb is another figure of
William, of bronze, seated. In the same church is a monument to Hugo
Grotius—'prodigium Europae'—the greatest lawyer of the seventeenth
century, presented to Henri IV. by Barneveld as 'La merveille de la
Hollande.'

On leaving the Hague a few hours should be given to the dull university
town of Leyden, unless it has been seen as an afternoon excursion from
the capital. This melancholy and mildewed little town, mouldering
from a century of stagnation, the birthplace of Rembrandt, surrounds
the central tower of its Burg—standing in the grounds of an inn,
which exacts payment from those who visit it. Close by is the huge
church of S. Pancras—Houglansche Kerk—of the fifteenth century,
containing the tomb of Van der Werff, burgomaster during the famous
siege, who answered the starving people, when they came demanding
bread or surrender, that he had 'sworn to defend the city, and, with
God's help, he meant to keep his oath, but that if his body would
help them to prolong the defence, they might take it and share it
amongst those who were most hungry.' A covered bridge over a canal
leads to the Bredenstrasse, where there is a picturesque grey stone
Stadhuis of the sixteenth century. It contains the principal work of
Cornelius Engelbrechtsen of Leyden (1468-1533), one of the earliest
of Dutch painters—an altarpiece representing the Crucifixion, with
the Sacrifice of Abraham and Worship of the Brazen Serpent in the side
panels, as symbols of the Atonement: on the pedestal is a naked body,
out of which springs a tree—the tree of life—and beside it kneel the
donors. The neighbouring church of S. Peter (1315) contains the tomb
of Boerhaave, the physician, whose lectures in the University were
attended by Peter the Great, and for whom a Chinese mandarin found
'à l'illustre M. Boerhaave, médecin, en Europe,' quite sufficient
direction. Boerhaave was the doctor who said that the poor were his
best patients, for God paid for them.

The streets are grass-grown, the houses damp, the canals green with
weed. The University has fallen into decadence since others were
established at Utrecht, Groningen, and Amsterdam; but Leyden is still
the most flourishing of the four. When William of Orange offered the
citizens freedom from taxes, as a reward for their endurance of the
famous siege, they thanked him, but said they would rather have a
university. Grotius and Cartesius (Descartes), Arminius and Gomar,
were amongst its professors, and the University possesses an admirable
botanical museum and a famous collection of Japanese curiosities.

The Rhine cuts up the town of Leyden into endless islands, connected by
a hundred and fifty bridges. On a quiet canal near the Beesten Markt
is the Museum, which contains the 'Last Judgment' of Lucas van Leyden
(1494-1533), a scholar of Engelbrechtsen, and one of the patriarchs of
Dutch painting.

A few minutes bring us from Leyden to Haarlem by the railway. It
crosses an isthmus between the sea and a lake which covered the whole
country between Leyden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam till 1839, when it
became troublesome, and the States-General forthwith, after the fashion
of Holland, voted its destruction. Enormous engines were at once
employed to drain it by pumping the water into canals, which carried it
to the sea, and the country was the richer by a new province.

[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE, HAARLEM.]

Haarlem, on the river Spaarne, stands out distinct in recollection from
all other Dutch towns, for it has the most picturesque market-place
in Holland—the Groote Markt—surrounded by quaint houses of varied
outline, amidst which rises the Groote Kerk of S. Bavo, a noble
cruciform fifteenth-century building. The interior, however, is as
bare and hideous as all other Dutch churches. It contains a monument
to the architect Conrad, designer of the famous locks of Katwijk,
'the defender of Holland against the fury of the sea and the power of
tempests.' Behind the choir is the tomb of the poet Bilderdijk, who
only died in 1831, and near this the grave of Laurenz Janzoom—the
Coster or Sacristan—who is asserted in his native town, but never
believed outside it, to have been the real inventor of printing, as he
is said to have cut out letters in wood, and taken impressions from
them in ink, as early as 1423. His partisans also maintain that whilst
he was attending a midnight mass, praying for patience to endure the
ill-treatment of his enemies, all his implements were stolen, and
that when he found this out on his return he died of grief. It is
further declared that the robber was Faust of Mayence, the brother
of Gutenberg, and that it was thus that the honour of the invention
passed from Holland to Germany, where Gutenberg produced his invention
of movable type twelve years later. There is a statue of the Coster in
front of the church, and, on its north side, his house is preserved and
adorned with his bust.

Amongst a crowd of natives with their hats on, talking in church
as in the market-place, we waited to hear the famous organ of
Christian Muller (1735-38), and grievously were we disappointed
with its discordant noises. All the men smoked in church, and this
we saw repeatedly; but it would be difficult to say where we ever
saw a Dutchman with a pipe out of his mouth. Every man seemed to be
systematically smoking away the few wits he possessed.

Opposite the Groote Kerk is the Stadhuis, an old palace of the Counts
of Holland remodelled. It contains a delightful little gallery of
the works of Franz Hals, which at once transports the spectator into
the Holland of two hundred years ago—such is the marvellous variety
of life and vigour impressed into its endless figures of stalwart
officers and handsome young archers pledging each other at banquet
tables and seeming to welcome the visitor with jovial smiles as he
enters the chamber, or of serene old ladies, 'regents' of hospitals,
seated at their council boards. The immense power of the artist is
shown in nothing so much as in the hands, often gloved, dashed in
with instantaneous power, yet always having the effect of the most
consummate finish at a distance. Behind one of the pictures is the
entrance to the famous 'secret-room of Haarlem,' seldom seen, but
containing an inestimable collection of historic relics of the time of
the famous siege of Leyden.

April and May are the best months for visiting Haarlem, which is the
bulb nursery garden of the world. 'Oignons à fleurs' are advertised for
sale everywhere. Tulips are more cultivated than any other flowers,
as ministering most to the national craving for colour; but times are
changed since a single bulb of the tulip 'L'Amiral Liefkenshoch' sold
for 4,500 florins, one of 'Viceroy' for 4,200, and one of 'Semper
Augustus' for 13,000.

Now we entered Amsterdam, to which we had looked forward as the climax
of our tour, having read of it and pondered upon it as 'the Venice of
the north;' but our expectations were raised much too high. Anything
more unlike Venice it would be difficult to imagine: and there is a
terrible want of variety and colour; many of the smaller towns of
Holland are far more interesting and infinitely more picturesque.

[Illustration: MILL NEAR AMSTERDAM.]

A castle was built at Amsterdam in 1204, but the town only became
important in the sixteenth century, since which it has been the most
commercial of ancient European cities. It is situated upon the influx
of the Amstel to the Y, as the arm of the Zuider Zee which forms the
harbour is called, and it occupies a huge semicircle, its walls being
enclosed by the broad moat, six and a half miles long, which is known
as Buitensingel. The greater part of the houses are built on piles,
causing Erasmus to say that the inhabitants lived on trees like rooks.
In the centre of the town is the great square called Dam, one side of
which is occupied by the handsome Royal Palace—Het Palais—built by J.
van Kampen in 1648. The Nieuwe Kerk (1408-1470) contains a number of
monuments to admirals, including those of Van Ruiter—'immensi tremor
oceani'—who commanded at the battle of Solbay, and Van Speyk, who blew
himself up with his ship in 1831, rather than yield to the Belgians. In
the Oude Kerk of 1300 there are more tombs of admirals. Hard by, in the
Nieuwe Markt, is the picturesque cluster of fifteenth-century towers
called S. Anthonieswaag, once a city gate and now a weighing-house.

But the great attraction of Amsterdam is the Picture Gallery of the
Trippenhuis, called the Rijks Museum, and it deserves many visits.
Amongst the portraits in the first room we were especially attracted
by that of William the Silent in his skull-cap, by Miereveld, but
all the House of Orange are represented here from the first to the
last. We also see all the worthies of the nation—Ruyter, Van Tromp
and his wife, Grotius and his wife, Johann and Cornelis de Witt,
Johann van Oldenharneveldt, and his wife Maria of Utrecht, a peaceful
old lady in a ruff and brown dress edged with fur, by Moreelse. The
two great pictures of the gallery hang opposite each other. That by
Bartholomew van der Helst, the most famous of Dutch portrait-painters,
represents the Banquet of the Musqueteers, who thus celebrated the
Peace of Westphalia, June 18, 1648. It contains twenty-five life-size
portraits, is the best work of the master, and was pronounced by Sir
Joshua Reynolds to be the 'first picture of portraits in the world.'
The canvas is a mirror faithfully representing a scene of actual life.
In the centre sits the jovial, rollicking Captain de Wits with his
legs crossed. The delicate imitation of reality is equally shown in
the Rhenish wine-glasses, and in the ham to which one of the guests is
helping himself.

The rival picture is the 'Night Watch' of Rembrandt (1642),
representing Captain Frans Banning Kok of Purmerland and his lieutenant
Willem van Ruytenberg of Vlaardingen, emerging from their watch-house
on the Singel. A joyous troop pursue their leader, who is in a black
dress. A strange light comes upon the scene, who can tell whence? Half
society has always said that this picture was the marvel of the world,
half that it is unworthy of its artist; but no one has ever been quite
indifferent to it.

Of the other pictures we must at least notice, by Nicholas Maas, a
thoughtful girl leaning on a cushion out of a window with apricots
beneath; and by Jan Steen, 'The Parrot Cage,' a simple scene of tavern
life, in which the waiting-maid calls to the parrot hanging aloft, who
looks knowingly out of the cage, whilst all the other persons present
go on with their different employments. In the 'Eve of S. Nicholas,'
another work of the same artist, a naughty boy finds a birch-rod in
his shoe, and a good little girl, laden with gifts, is being praised
by her mother, whilst other children are looking up the chimney by
which the discriminating fairy Befana is supposed to have taken her
departure. There are many beautiful works of Ruysdael, most at home
amongst waterfalls; a noble Vandyke of 'William II.' as a boy, with
his little bride, Mary Stuart, Charles I.'s daughter, in a brocaded
silver dress; and the famous Terburg called 'Paternal Advice' (known
in England by its replica at Bridgewater House), in which a daughter
in white satin is receiving a lecture from her father, her back turned
to the spectator, and her annoyance, or repentance, only exhibited in
her shoulders. Another famous work of Terburg is 'The Letter,' which is
being brought in by a trumpeter to an officer seated in his uniform,
with his young wife kneeling at his side. Of Gerard Dou Amsterdam
possesses the wonderful 'Evening School,' with four luminous candles,
and some thoroughly Dutch children. A girl is laboriously following
with her finger the instructions received, and a boy is diligently
writing on a slate. The girl who stands behind, instructing him, is
holding a candle which throws a second light upon his back, that upon
the table falling on his features; indeed the painting is often known
as the 'Picture of the Four Candles.'

Through the labyrinthine quays we found our way to the Westerhoof to
take the afternoon steamer to Purmerende for an excursion to Broek,
'the cleanest village in the world.' Crossing the broad Amstel, the
vessel soon enters a canal, which sometimes lies at a great depth,
nothing being visible but the tops of masts and points of steeples; and
which then, after passing locks, becomes level with the tops of the
trees and the roofs of the houses. We left the steamer at T Schouw,
and entered, on a side canal, one of the trekschuiten, which, until
the time of railroads, were the usual means of travel—a long narrow
cabin, encircled by seats, forms the whole vessel, and is drawn by a
horse ridden by a boy (het-jagerte)—a most agreeable easy means of
locomotion, for movement is absolutely imperceptible.

No place was ever more exaggerated than Broek. There is really very
little remarkable in it, except even a greater sense of dampness and
ooziness than in the other Dutch villages. It was autumn, and there
seemed no particular attempt to remove the decaying vegetation or trim
the little gardens, or to sweep up the dead leaves upon the pathways,
yet there used to be a law that no animal was to enter Broek for fear
of its being polluted. A brick path winds amongst the low wooden
cottages, painted blue, green, and white, and ends at the church, with
its miniature tombstones.

The most interesting excursion to be made from Amsterdam is that
to the Island of Marken in the Zuider Zee—a huge meadow, where the
peasant women pass their whole lives without ever seeing anything
beyond their island, whilst their husbands, who with very few
exceptions are fishermen, see nothing beyond the fisher-towns of the
Zuider Zee. There are very picturesque costumes here, the men wearing
red woollen shirts, brown vests, wooden shoes, fur caps, and gold
buttons to their collars and knickerbockers; the women, embroidered
stomachers, which are handed down for generations, and enormous white
caps, lined with brown to show off the lace, and with a chintz cover
for week days, and their own hair flowing below the cap over their
shoulders and backs.

An evening train, with an old lady, in a diamond tiara and gold pins,
for our companion, took us to the Helder, and we awoke next morning
at the pleasant little inn of Du Burg upon a view of boats and nets
and the low-lying Island of Texel in the distance. The boats and the
fishermen are extremely picturesque, but there is nothing else to
see, after the visitor has examined the huge granite Helder Dyke, the
artificial fortification of north Holland, which contends successfully
to preserve the land against the sea. There is an admirably managed
Naval Institute here. It was by an expedition from the Helder that
Nova Zembla was discovered, and it was near this that Admirals Ruyter
and Tromp repulsed the English fleet. Texel, which lies opposite the
Helder, is the first of a chain of islands—Vlieland, Terschelling, and
Ameland, which protect the entrance of the Zuider Zee.

[Illustration: APPROACH TO ALKMAAR.]

The country near the Helder is bare and desolate in the extreme. It is
all peat, and the rest of Holland uses it as a fuel mine. It was here
that the genius of Ruysdael was often able to make a single tree, or
even a bush rising out of the flat by a stagnant pool, both interesting
and charming to the spectator. We crossed the levels to Alkmaar, which
struck us as being altogether the prettiest place in the country and
as possessing all those attributes of cleanliness which are usually
given to Broek. The streets, formed of bricks fitted close together,
are absolutely spotless, and every house front shines fresh from
the mop or the syringe. Yet excessive cleanliness has not destroyed
the picturesqueness of the place. The fifteenth-century church of
S. Lawrence, of exquisitely graceful exterior, rises in the centre
of the town, and, in spite of being hideously defaced inside, has a
fine vaulted roof, a coloured screen, and, in the chancel, a curious
tomb to Florens V., Count of Holland, 1296, though only his heart is
buried there. Near the excellent Hôtel du Burg is a most bewitching
almshouse, with an old tourelle and screen, and a lovely garden in a
court surrounded by clipped lime-trees. And more charming still is
an old weigh-house of 1582, for the cheese, the great manufacture of
the district, for which there is a famous market every Friday, where
capital costumes may be seen. The rich and gaily painted façade of the
old building, reflected in a clear canal, is a perfect marvel of beauty
and colour; and artists should stay here to paint—not the view given
here, but another which we discovered too late—more in front, with
gable-ended houses leading up to the principal building, and all its
glowing colours repeated in the water.

[Illustration: THE WEIGH-HOUSE, ALKMAAR.]

It is three hours' drive from Alkmaar to Hoorn, a charming old town
with bastions, gardens, and semi-ruined gates. On the West Poort a
relief commemorates the filial devotion of a poor boy, who arrived here
in 1579, laboriously dragging his old mother in a sledge, when all were
flying from the Spaniards. Opposite the weighing-house for the cheeses
is the State College, which bears a shield with the arms of England,
sustained by two negroes. It commemorates the fact that when Van Tromp
defeated the English squadron, his ships came from Hoorn and on board
were two negroes, who took from the English flagship the shield which
it was then the custom to fix to the stern of a vessel, and brought it
back here as a trophy. Hoorn was one of the first places in Holland to
embrace the reformed religion, which spread from hence all over the
country, but now not above half the inhabitants are Calvinists.

In returning from Alkmaar we stopped to see Zaandam, quite in the
centre of the land of windmills, of which we counted eighty as visible
from the station alone. They are of every shade of colour, and are
mounted on poles, on towers, on farm buildings, and made picturesque
by every conceivable variety of prop, balcony, gallery, and insertion.
Zaandam is a very pretty village on the Zaan which flows into the
Y, with gaily painted houses, and gay little gardens, and perpetual
movement to and from its landing-stage. Turning south from thence, a
little entry on the right leads down some steps and over a bridge to
some cottages on the bank of a ditch, and inside the last of these is
the tiny venerable hovel where Peter the Great stayed in 1697 as Peter
Michaeloff. It retains its tiled roof and contains some old chairs and
a box-bed, but unfortunately Peter was only here a week.

[Illustration: MILL AT ZAANDAM.]

[Illustration: PAUSHUIZEN, UTRECHT.]

The evening of leaving Zaandam we spent at Utrecht, of which the
name is so well known from the peace which terminated the war of the
Spanish succession, April 11, 1715. The town, long the seat of an
ecclesiastical court, was also the great centre of the Jansenists,
dissenters from Roman Catholicism under Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres,
condemned by Alexander VII. in 1656, at the instigation of the
Jesuits. The doctrines of Jansenius still linger in its gloomy houses.
Every appointment of a bishop is still announced to the Sovereign
Pontiff, who as regularly responds by a bull of excommunication, which
is read aloud in the cathedral, and then immediately put away and
forgotten. Solemn and sad, but pre-eminently respectable, Utrecht has
more the aspect of a decayed German city than a Dutch town, and so
has its Cathedral of S. Martin (1254-67), which, though the finest
Gothic building in Holland, is only a magnificent fragment, with a
detached tower (1321-82) 338 feet high. The interior as usual is ruined
by Calvinism and yellow paint. It contains the tomb of Admiral van
Gent, who fell in the battle of Solbay. The nave, which fell in 1674,
has never been rebuilt. The S. Pieterskerk (1039) and S. Janskerk
offer nothing remarkable, but on a neighbouring canal is the quaint
Paushuizen, or Pope's house, which was built by Pope Adrian VI. (Adrian
Floriszoom) in 1517. Near this is the pretty little Archiepiscopal
Museum, full of mediæval relics.

The interesting Moravian establishment of Zeist may be visited from
Utrecht.

From Utrecht we travelled over sandy flats to Kampen, near the
mouth of the wide river Yssel, with three picturesque gates—Haghen
Poort, Cellebroeders Poort, and Broeders Poort; and a town hall of
the sixteenth century. Here, as frequently elsewhere in Holland, we
suffered from arriving famished at midday. All the inns were equally
inhospitable: 'The table d'hôte is at 4 P.M.: we _cannot_ and _will
not_ be bothered with cooking before that, and there is nothing cold
in the house.' 'But you have surely bread and cheese?' 'Certainly
not—_nothing_.'

[Illustration: CELLEBROEDERS POORT, KAMPEN.]

At Zwolle, however, we found the Kroon an excellent hotel with an
obliging landlord; and Zwolle, the native place of Terburg (1608), is a
charming old town with a girdle of gardens, a fine church (externally),
and a noble brick gateway called the Sassenpoort.

[Illustration: SASSENPOORT, AT ZWOLLE.]

It was more the desire of seeing something of the whole country than
anything else, and a certain degree of misplaced confidence in the
pleasant volumes of Harvard, which took us up from Zwolle, through
Friesland, the cow-paradise, to Leeuwarden, its ancient capital. Sad
and gloomy as most other towns of Holland are, Leeuwarden is sadder and
gloomier still. Its streets are wide and not otherwise than handsome,
but they are almost deserted, and there are no objects of interest
to see unless a leaning tower can be called so, with a top, like that
at Pisa, inclined the other way, to keep it from toppling over. An
hour's walk from the town there is said to be a fine still-inhabited
castle, and, if time had allowed, respect for S. Boniface would have
taken us to Murmerwoude, where he was martyred (June 8, 853), with his
fifty-three companions. King Pepin raised a hermitage on the spot, and
an ancient brick chapel still exists there.

Here and elsewhere in Friesland nothing is so worthy of notice as the
helmets—the golden helmets of the women—costing something equivalent
to 25_l._ or 30_l._, handed down as heirlooms, fitting close to the
head, and not allowing a particle of hair to be visible.

In the late evening we went on to Groningen, a university town with
a good hotel (Seven Provincen), an enormous square, and a noble tall
Gothic tower of 1627, whence the watchman still sounds his bugle. Not
far off is Midwolde, where the village church has fine tombs of Charles
Jerome, Baron d'Inhausen and his wife, Anna von Ewsum.

As late as the sixteenth century this province was for the most part
uninhabited—savage and sandy, and overrun by wolves. But three hundred
years of hard work has transformed it into a fertile country, watered
by canals, and sprinkled with country houses. Agriculturally it is one
of the richest provinces of the kingdom. This is mostly due to its
possessing a race of peasant-farmers who never shrink from personal
hard work, and who will continue to direct the plough whilst they
send their sons to the university to study as lawyers, doctors, or
churchmen. These peasant farmers or boers possess the _beklemregt_, or
right of hiring land on an annual rent, which the landlord can never
increase. A peasant can bequeath his right to his heirs, whether direct
or collateral. To the land, this system is an indescribable advantage,
the cultivators doing their utmost to bring their lands to perfection,
because they are certain that no one can take away the advantage from
themselves or their descendants.

On leaving Groningen we traversed the grey, monotonous, desolate
district of the Drenthe, sprinkled over at intervals by the curious
ancient groups of stones called Hunnebedden, or beds of death (Hun
meaning death), beneath which urns of clay containing human ashes have
been found. From Deventer (where there is an old weigh-house, and a
cathedral of S. Lievin with a crypt and nave of 1334), time did not
allow us to make an excursion to the great royal palace of Het Loo,
the favourite residence of the sovereigns. The descriptions in Harvard
rather made us linger unnecessarily at Zutphen, a dull town, with a
brick Groote Kerk (S. Walpurgis) which has little remaining of its
original twelfth-century date, and a rather picturesque 'bit' on the
walls, where the 'Waterpoort' crosses the river like a bridge.

At Arnhem, the Roman Arenacum, once the residence of the Dukes of
Gueldres, and still the capital of Guelderland, we seemed to have left
all the characteristics of Holland behind. Numerous modern villas,
which might have been built for Cheltenham or Leamington, cover the
wooded hills above the Rhine. In the Groote Kerk (1452) is a curious
monument of Charles van Egmont, Duc de Gueldres, 1538, but there is
nothing else to remark upon. We intended to have made an excursion
hence to Cleves, but desperately wet weather set in, and, as Dutch rain
often lasts for weeks together when it once begins, we were glad to
hurry England-wards, only regretting that we could not halt at Nymegen,
a most picturesque place, where Charlemagne lived in the old palace of
the Valckhof (or Waalhof, residence on the Waal), of which a fragment
still exists, with an old baptistery, a Stadhuis of 1534, and a Groote
Kerk containing a noble monument to Catherine de Bourbon (1469), wife
of Duke Adolph of Gueldres.

We left Holland feeling that we should urge our friends by all means to
see the pictures at Rotterdam, the Hague, and Amsterdam, but to look
for all other characteristics of the Netherlands in such places as
Breda, Dortrecht, Haarlem, Alkmaar, and Zwolle.




_IN DENMARK._


Formerly the terrors of a sea-voyage from Kiel deterred many travellers
from thinking of a tour in Denmark or Sweden, but now a succession of
railways makes everything easy, and while nothing can be imagined more
invigorating or pleasant, there is probably no pleasure more economical
than a summer in Scandinavia. Those who are worn with a London season
will feel as if every breath in the crystal air of Denmark endued them
with fresh health and strength, and then, after they have seen its old
palaces and its beech woods and its Thorwaldsen sculptures, a voyage of
ten minutes will carry them over the narrow Sound to the soft beauties
of genial Sweden and the wild splendours of Norway.

Either Hamburg or Lübeck must be the starting-point for the overland
route to Denmark, and the old free city of Lübeck, though quite a small
place, is one of the most remarkable towns in Germany. We arrived
there one hot summer afternoon, after a weary journey over the arid
sandy plains which separate it from Berlin, and suddenly seemed to
be transported into a land of verdure. Lilacs and roses bloomed
everywhere; a wood lined the bank of the limpid river Trave, and in its
waters—beyond the old wooden bridge—were reflected all the tallest
steeples, often strangely out of the perpendicular, of many-towered
Lübeck. A wonderful gate of red brick and golden-hued terra-cotta
is the entrance from the station, and in the market-place are the
quaintest turrets, towers, tourelles, but all ending in spires. The
lofty houses, so full of rich colour, throw cool shade on the streets
on the hottest summer day; and we enjoyed a Sunday in the excellent
hotel, with wooden galleries opening towards a splashing fountain in a
quiet square, where a fat constable busied himself in keeping everybody
from fulfilling any avocation whatever whilst service was being
performed in the churches, but let them do exactly as they pleased as
soon as it was over.

It must, at best, be a weary journey across West Holstein, through
a succession of arid flats varied by stagnant swamps. We spent the
weary hours in studying Dunham's 'History of Denmark, Sweden, and
Norway,' which cannot be sufficiently recommended to all Scandinavian
travellers. The glowing accounts in the English guide books of a lake
and an old castle beguiled us into spending a night at Sleswig, but it
turned out that the lake had disappeared before the memory of man, and
that the castle was a white modern barrack. The colourless town and its
long sleepy suburb, moored as if upon a raft in the marshes, straggle
along the edge of a waveless fiord. At the end is the rugged cathedral
like a barn, with a belfry like a dovecot, and inside it a curious
altarpiece by Hans Brüggemann, pupil of Albert Dürer, and the noble
monument of Frederick I., the first Lutheran King of Denmark; while
richly carved doors at the sides of the church admit one to see how
the grandmother of the Princess of Wales and various other potentates
lie—Danish fashion—in gorgeous exposed coffins without any tombs
at all. Everywhere roses grow in the streets, trained upon the house
walls; and, up the pavement, crowds of the children were hurrying in
the early morning, carrying in their hands the shoes they were going
to wear when they were in school. In the evenings these children will
not venture outside the town, for over the marshes they say that the
wild huntsman rides, followed by his demon hounds and blowing his magic
horn. It is the spirit of Duke Abel the fratricide, who, in the fens,
murdered his brother Eric VI. of Denmark, and who was afterwards lost
there himself, falling from his horse, and being dragged down by the
weight of his armour. To give rest to his wandering spirit, the clergy
dug up his body and despatched it to Bremen, but there his vampire gave
the canons no peace, so they sent the corpse back again, and now it
lies once more in the marshes of Gottorp.

Most unutterably hideous is the country through which the railway
now travels, wearisome levels only broken here and there by mounds,
probably sepulchral. A straight line with tiny hillocks at intervals
would do for a sketch of the whole of Sleswig and the greater part of
Funen and Zealand. In times of early Danish history it was a frequent
punishment to bury criminals alive in these dismal peat mosses. Twelve
hours of changelessly flat scenery bring travellers from Hamburg to
Frederikshaven, where we embark upon the Little Belt, the luggage-vans
of the train being shunted on board the steamer. Immediately opposite
lie the sandy shores of Funen, and in a few minutes we are there.
Then four hours of ugly scenery take us across the island. It is only
necessary to look out at the little town of Odense, called after the
old hero-god, which was the birth-place of Hans Christian Andersen in
1805. The cathedral of Odense contains the shrine of the sainted King
Canute IV. (1080-86), who was murdered while kneeling before the altar,
owing to indignation at the severe taxation to which the love of Church
endowment had incited him.

Nyborg, where we meet the sea again, will recall to lovers of old
ballads the story of the innocent young knight Folker Lowmanson, and
his cruel death here in a barrel of spikes, from the jealousy of
Waldemar IV. for his beautiful queen Helwig, and how, to know his fate—

    With anxious heart did Denmark's Queen
      To Nyborg urge her horse,
    And at the gate his bier she met,
      And on it Folker's corse.

    Such honour shown to son of knight
      I never yet could hear;
    The Queen of Denmark walked on foot
      Herself before his bier.

    In tears then Helwig mounted horse
      And silent homeward rode,
    For in her heart a life-long grief
      Had taken its abode.

At Nyborg we embark on a miserable steamer for the passage of the
Great Belt. It lasts an hour and a half, and is often most wretched.
On landing at Korsor travellers are hurried into the train which is
waiting for the vessel.

Now the country improves a little. Here and there we pass through
great beech woods. Down the green glades of one of them a glimpse is
caught of the college of Sorö. It occupies the site of a monastery
founded by Asker Ryg, a chieftain who, when he departed on a journey
of warfare, vowed that if the child to which his wife, Inge, was about
to give birth proved to be a girl, he would give his new building a
spire, but a tower if it were a boy. On his return he saw two towers
rising in the distance. Inge had given birth to twin sons, who lived
to become Asbiorn Snare, celebrated in the ballad of 'Fair Christal,'
and Absalon, the warrior Bishop of Roeskilde—'first captain by sea and
land.' Absalon is buried here in the church of Sorö, which contains the
tomb of King Olaf, the shortlived son of the famous Queen Margaret;
of her cruel father, Waldemar Atterdag, whose last words expressed
regret that he had not suffocated his daughter in her cradle; and of
her grandfather, Christopher II., with his wife, Euphemia of Pomerania.
Soon we pass Ringsted, which is scarcely worth stopping at, though
its church contains the fine brass of King Erik Menred (1319) and his
queen, Ingeborga, and though twenty kings and queens were entombed
there before Roeskilde became the royal place of sepulture. Amongst
them lies the popular Queen Dagmar, first wife of Waldemar II., still
celebrated in ballad literature, for there is scarcely a Dane who is
ignorant of the touching story of 'Queen Dagmar's Death,' which begins

    Queen Dagmar is lying at Ribé sick,
      At Ringsted is made her grave,

and which contains her last touching request to her husband, and her
simple confession of the only 'sin' she could remember—

    Had I on a Sunday not laced my sleeves,
      Or border upon them sewn,
    No pangs had I felt by day or night,
      Or torture of hell-fire known.

Tradition tells us that the dismal town of Ringsted was founded by King
Ring, a warrior who, when he was seriously wounded in battle, placed
the bodies of his slain heroes and that of his queen, Alpol, on board a
ship laden with pitch, and going out to the open sea, set the vessel on
fire, and then fell upon his sword.

In the twilight we pass Roeskilde, and at 10-1/2 P.M. long rows of
street lamps reflected in canals show that we have reached Copenhagen.

To those whose travels have chiefly led them southwards there is a
great pleasure in the first awaking in Copenhagen. Everything is
new—the associations, the characteristics, the history; even the
very names on the omnibuses are suggestive of the sagas and romances
of the North; and though the summer sun is hot, the atmosphere is as
clear as that of a tramontana day in an Italian winter, and the air is
indescribably elastic. The comfortable Hôtel d'Angleterre stands in
the Kongens Nytorv, a modern square, with trees surrounding a statue
in the centre, but there are glimpses of picturesque shipping down the
side streets, and hard by is a spire quite ideally Danish, formed by
three marvellous dragons with their tails twisted together in the air.
Tradition declares that it was moved bodily from Calmar, in the south
of Sweden. It rises now from a beautiful building of brick erected in
1624 by Christian IV., brother-in-law of James I. of England, and used
as the Exchange.

Not far off is the principal palace—Christiansborg Slot, often
rebuilt, and very white and ugly. It was partially destroyed by fire in
1884. Besides the royal residence, its vast courts contain the Chambers
of Parliament, the Royal Library, and a Picture Gallery chiefly filled
with the works of native artists, amongst which those of Marstrand and
Bloch are very striking and well worthy of attention.

[Illustration: THE DRAGON TOWER, COPENHAGEN.]

A queer building in the shadow of the palace, which attracts notice by
its frescoed walls, is the Thorwaldsen Museum, the shrine where Denmark
has reverentially collected all the works and memorials of her greatest
artist—Bertel Thorwaldsen. Though his family is said to have descended
from the Danish king Harold Stildetand, he was born (in 1770) the son
of one Gottschalk, who, half workman, half artist, was employed in
carving figures for the bows of vessels. From his earliest childhood
little Bertel accompanied his father to the wharfs and assisted him in
his work, in which he showed such intelligence that in his eleventh
year he was allowed to enter the Free School of Art. Here he soon made
wonderful progress in sculpture, but could so little be persuaded to
attend to other studies that he reached the age of eighteen scarcely
able to read. In his twenty-third year he obtained the great gold
medal, to which a travelling stipend is attached, and thus he was
enabled to go to Rome, where, encouraged at first by the patronage of
Thomas Hope, the English banker, he soon reached the highest pitch of
celebrity. Denmark became proud of her son, so that his visits to his
native town in 1819 and 1837 were like triumphal progresses, all the
city going forth to meet him, and lodging him splendidly at the public
cost; but his heart always clung to the Eternal City, which continued
to be the scene of his labours. Of his many works perhaps his noble
lion at Lucerne is the best known. He never married, though he was long
attached to a member of the old Scottish house of Mackenzie, and he
died on a visit to Copenhagen in 1844.

In accordance with Thorwaldsen's own wish, he rests in the centre of
his works. His grave has no tombstone, but is covered with green ivy.
All around the little court which contains it are halls and galleries
filled with the marvellously varied productions of his genius, arranged
in the order of their execution—casts of all his absent sculptures
and many most grand originals. Especially beautiful are the statue
of Mercury, modelled from a Roman boy, of which the original is in
the possession of Lord Ashburton, and the exquisite reliefs of the
Ages of Love, and of Day and Night, the two latter resulting from
the inspiration of a single afternoon. But all seem to culminate in
the great Hall of Christ, for though the statues here are only cast
from those in the Vor Frue Kirche, they are far better seen in the
well-lighted chamber than in the church. The colossal figures of the
apostles lead up to the Saviour in sublime benediction; perhaps the
statues of Simon Zelotes and the pilgrim S. James are the noblest
amongst them. In the last room are gathered all the little personal
memorials of Thorwaldsen—his books, pictures, and furniture.

[Illustration: The Rosenborg Palace, Copenhagen.]

The Museum of Northern Antiquities should also be visited and the Tower
of the Trinity Church, with a roadway inside making an easy ascent to
the strange view of many roofs and many waters which is obtained from
the top. But the most delightful place in Copenhagen is the Palace
of Rosenborg, standing at the end of a stately old garden—where it
was built by Inigo Jones for Christian IV., and containing the room
where the king died, with his wedding dress, and most of his other
clothes and possessions. This palace-building monarch, celebrated
for the drinking bouts in which he indulged with his brother-in-law,
James I. of England, was the greatest dandy of his time, and before
we leave Denmark we shall become very familiar with his portraits,
always distinguished by the wonderful left whisker twisted into a
pigtail falling on one side of the chin. Other rooms in Rosenborg
are devoted to each of the succeeding sovereigns, and filled with
relics and memorials which carry one back into most romantic corners
of Danish history, the ever-alternate succession of Christians and
Fredericks making a most terrible bewilderment, down to the two English
queens, Louisa the beloved and Caroline Matilda the unfortunate. Most
curious amongst a myriad objects of value are the three great silver
Lions—'Great Belt, Little Belt, and Sound'—which, by ancient custom,
appear as mourners at all the funerals of the sovereigns, accompanying
them to Roeskilde and returning afterwards to the palace.

Those interested in such matters will wander as we did through the
more ancient parts of Copenhagen in search of old silver and specimens
of the older Copenhagen china. Formerly the china imitated that of
Miessen, but it has now a more distinctive character, and is chiefly
used in reproducing the works of Thorwaldsen. Copenhagen has no other
especial manufactures.

No visitors to the Danish capital must omit a visit to Tivoli, the
pretty odd pleasure grounds—very respectable too—near the railway
station, where all kinds of evening amusements are provided in
illuminated gardens and woods by a tiny lake, really very pretty.
Here we watched the cars rushing like a whirlwind down one hill and up
another, with their inmates screaming in pleasurable agony; and saw the
extraordinary feats of 'the Cannon King,' who tossed a cannon ball,
catching it on his hands, his head, his feet—anywhere, and then stood
in front of a cannon and was shot, receiving in his hands the ball,
which did nothing worse than twist him round by its force.

[Illustration: ROESKILDE.]

One day we went out—an hour and a half by rail—to Roeskilde, where
a church was first founded by William, an Englishman, in the days of
King Harold Blaatand (Blue-tooth), brother of Canute the Great. It is
dedicated to S. Lucius, because tradition tells that a terrible dragon,
who infested the neighbouring fiord and banqueted on the inhabitants,
was destroyed for ever when the head of the holy Pope S. Lucius was
brought from Rome and presented for his breakfast. The tall spires
of the cathedral rise, slender and grey, from the little town, and
beneath, embosomed in sweeping cornfields, a lovely fiord stretches
away into pale blue distances. Endless kings and queens are buried at
Roeskilde. The earlier sovereigns have glorious tombs, amongst which
the most conspicuous is that of Queen Margaret—'the Semiramis of the
North,' who, born in the prison of Syborg, where her unhappy mother
Queen Helwig was imprisoned by Waldemar Atterhag, and allowed to run
wild in the forest in her childhood, lived to become one of the wisest
of Northern sovereigns, and to unite, by the Act known as 'the Union
of Calmar,' the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, which attained
unwonted prosperity under her sway. There are effigies of Frederic
II. and Christian IV., the grandfather and uncle of our Charles I.,
which recall his type of countenance and have the same peaked beard.
Christian IV., the great palace-builder, whose birth was believed
to have been prophesied by the mermaid Isbrand, was born (April 12,
1577) under a hawthorn tree on the road between Frederiksborg and
Roeskilde, as his mother, Sophia of Mecklenbourg, insisted on taking
walks with her ladies in waiting far longer than was prudent. This
king, his father, and all the later members of his royal house lie,
not in their tombs, but in gorgeous coffins embossed with gold and
silver upon the floor of the church, which has a very odd effect. The
entrance of one of the private chapels is a gate with a huge figure, in
wrought ironwork, of the devil with his tail in his hand. In another
chapel are fine works of Marstrand (1810-75), the best of the pupils
of Eckersberg, who gave the first stimulus to the art of painting in
Denmark, where it has since attained to great eminence.

[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF FREDERIKSBORG.]

The district around Roeskilde, and indeed the greater part of Denmark,
is devoted to corn, for there is no country in Europe, except
England and Belgium, which can compete with this as a corn-grower.
It is curious that though the neighbouring Sweden and Norway are so
covered with pines, no conifer will grow in Denmark except under most
careful cultivation. The principal native tree is the beech, and the
beech woods are nowhere more beautiful than in the neighbourhood of
Copenhagen. The railway to Elsinore passes through the beautiful beech
forests which are familiar to us through the stories of Hans Christian
Andersen. Here, near a little roadside station, rises the Hampton Court
of Denmark, the great Castle of Frederiksborg, the most magnificent
of the creations of Christian IV., which John of Friburg erected for
that monarch, who looked personally into the minutest details of
his expenses, and so raised this structure, glorious as it is, with
an economy which greatly astonished his thrifty parliament. In the
depths of the beech woods is a great lake, in the centre of which, on
three islands united by bridges, rises the palace, most beautiful in
its time-honoured hues of red brick and grey stone, with high roofs,
richly sculptured windows, and wondrous towers and spires. Each view
of the castle seems more picturesque than the last. It is a dream
of architectural beauty, to which the great expanse of transparent
waters and the deep verdure of the surrounding woods add a mysterious
charm. A gigantic gate tower admits the visitor to the courtyard, where
Christian IV., with his own hand, chopped off the head of the Master
of the Mint, which he had established here, who had defrauded him.
'He tried to cheat us, but we have cheated him, for we have chopped
his head off,' said the King. Inside, the palace has been gorgeously
restored since a great fire by which it was terribly injured in 1859.
The chapel, with the pew of Christian IV.—'bedekammer,' prayer
chamber, it is called—is most curious. There is a noble series of
the pictures of the native artist Carl Bloch, recalling the works of
Overbeck in their majesty and depth of feeling, but far more forcible.

A drive of four miles through beech woods leads to the comfortable
later palace of Fredensborg, built as 'a Castle of Peace' by Frederick
IV. and Louisa of Mecklenbourg, with a lovely garden, and a view of the
Esrom lake down green glades, in one of which is a mysterious assembly
of stone statues in Norwegian costumes.

[Illustration: CASTLE OF ELSINORE.]

We may either take the railway or drive by Gurre from hence to
Elsinore (Helsingor), where the great castle of Kronberg rises, with
many towers built of grey stone, at the end of the little town on a
low promontory jutting out into the sea. Stately avenues surround
its bastions, and it is delightful to walk upon the platform where
the first scene of Shakspere's 'Hamlet' is laid, and to watch the
numberless ships in the narrow Sound which divides Denmark and
Sweden. The castle is in perfect preservation. It was formerly used
as a palace. Anne of Denmark was married here by proxy to James VI.
of Scotland, and here poor Caroline Matilda sate daily for hours at
her prison window watching vainly for the fleet of England which she
believed was coming to her rescue. Beyond the castle, a sandy plain
reminding us of Scottish links, covered with bent-grass and drifted
by seaweed, extends to Marienlyst, a little fashionable bathing place
embosomed in verdure. Here a Carmelite convent was founded by the wife
of Eric IX., that Queen Philippa—daughter of Henry IV. of England—who
successfully defended Copenhagen against the Hanseatic League, but was
afterwards beaten by her husband, because her ships were defeated at
Stralsund, an indignity which drove her to a monastic life. Hamlet's
Grave and Ophelia's Brook are shown at Marienlyst, having been invented
for anxious inquirers by the complaisant inhabitants. Alas! both
were unknown to Andersen, who lived here in his childhood, and it is
provoking to learn that Hamlet had really no especial connection with
Elsinore, and was the son of a Jutland pirate in the insignificant
island of Mors. But Denmark is the very home of picturesque stories,
which are kept alive there by the ballad literature of the land,
chiefly of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, but still known to
rich and poor alike as in no other country. For hundreds of years
these poetical histories have been the tunes to which, in winter, when
no other exercise can be taken, people dance for hours, holding each
other's hands in two lines, making three steps forwards and backwards,
keeping time, balancing, or remaining still for a moment, as they sing
one of their old ballads or its refrain.

[Illustration: TOWER OF HELSINGBORG CHURCH.]

It was in a wild evening, with huge blue foam-crested waves rushing
down the Sound, that we crossed in ten minutes to Helsingborg in
Sweden, mounted for the sunset to the one huge remaining tower of its
castle, and sketched as typical of almost all village towers in Denmark
the belfry of the church where King Eric Menred was married to the
Swedish princess Ingeborga.




_IN SWEDEN._


It is not beautiful in Sweden, but it is very pretty; if everything
were not so very much alike, it would be very pretty indeed. The whole
country as far north as Upsala is like an exaggerated Surrey—little
hills covered with fir-woods and bilberries, brilliant, glistening
little lakes sleeping in sandy hollows, but all just like one another.

We turned aside in our way from Helsingborg to the north to visit the
old university of Lund, the Oxford of Sweden, a sleepy city, where the
students lead a separate life in lodgings of their own, only being
united in the public lectures; for in Sweden, as in Italy, the taking
of a degree only proves that the graduates have passed a certain number
of examinations, not, as in England, that they have lived together
for three years at least, forming their character and taste by mutual
companionship and intimacy. The cathedral of Lund is a most noble
Norman building, with giants and dwarfs sculptured against the pillars
of its grand crypt, and a glorious archbishop's tomb, green and mossy
with damp.

[Illustration: THE JUNCTION OF LAKE MALAR AND THE BALTIC, STOCKHOLM.]

An immense railway journey, by day and night through the endless
forests, brought us to Stockholm, where we arrived in the early
morning. Though the town is little beyond an ugly collection of
featureless modern streets, the situation is quite exquisite, for the
city occupies a succession of islets between Lake Malar and the Baltic,
surrounding, on a central isle, the huge Palace built from stately
designs of Count Tessin in the middle of the last century, and the old
church of Riddarholmen, where Gustavus Adolphus and many other royal
persons repose beneath the banner-hung arches.

It sounds odd, but, next to the Palace, the most imposing building
in Stockholm is certainly the Grand Hotel Rydberg, which is most
comfortable and economical, in spite of its palatial aspect. There
is no table d'hôte, and everything is paid for at the time, in the
excellent restaurant on the first floor of the hotel. Here, a side
table is always covered with dainties peculiarly Swedish, corn and
birch brandy, and different kinds of potted fish, with fresh butter
and olives, and it is the universal custom in Sweden to attack the
side table before sitting down to the regular dinner. The rooms in
the hotel are excellent, and their front windows overlook all that is
most characteristic in Stockholm—the glorious view down the fiord of
the Baltic: its farther hilly bank covered with houses and churches;
the bridge at the junction of the Baltic and Lake Malar, which is the
centre of life in the capital, and the little pleasure garden below,
where hundreds of people are constantly eating and drinking under the
trees, and whence strains of music are wafted late into the summer
night; the mighty palace dominating the principal island, and the
little steam gondolas, filled with people, which dart and hiss through
the waters from one island to another. In Stockholm, where waters
are many and bridges few, these steam gondolas are the chief means of
communication, and we made great use of them, the passages costing
twelve oëre, or one penny. The great white sea-gulls, poising over the
water-streets or floating upon the waves, are also a striking feature.

The museums of Stockholm have little to call for any especial notice,
except a grand statue of the sleeping Endymion from the Villa Adriana,
and the curious collection of royal clothes down to the present date, a
gallery of costume like that which once existed in London at the Tower
Royal. The chief curiosity which the Swedish collection contains is
the hat worn by Charles XII. when he was killed, in which the upward
progress of the bullet can be traced, proving that the king's death was
caused by an assassin, and not the result of a chance shot from the
walls of Frederikshald. No especial features mark the interior of the
Palace, though the Royal Stable for a hundred and forty-six horses is
worthy of a visit; and the churches are uninteresting, except perhaps
S. Nicholas, the coronation church, which contains the helmet and
spurs of S. Olaf, stolen from Throndtjem. Riddarholmen can scarcely
be regarded as a church; it is rather a great sepulchral hall hung
with trophies, having a few tombs on the floor of the building, and
vaults opening under the side walls, in which the different groups
of royal persons are buried together in families. Under a chapel on
the left lies Gustavus Adolphus, the justly popular great-grandson of
Gustavus Wasa, who fell at the battle of Lutzen, and who, as soldier,
general, and king, ever knew true merit, and laboured for the glory of
his country rather than for his own. In the opposite chapel repose the
present royal family, descendants of Bernadotte, Prince of Pontecorvo,
the only one of Napoleon's generals whose dynasty still occupies a
throne. He began life as a common soldier, and his election as Charles
XIV. of Sweden was chiefly due to the kindness with which he treated
Swedish prisoners taken in the Pomeranian wars. But the Swedes have
never had cause to repent of their choice, and their reigning house is
probably the most popular in Europe. The coffins of those members of
the royal family who have died within the memory of man are ever laden
with fresh flowers.

Close by the Riddarholmen Church is the most picturesque bit of
street architecture in Stockholm, where a statue of Burger Jarl, the
traditional founder of the town, forms a foreground to the chapel of
Gustavus Adolphus and one of the many bridges.

[Illustration: RIDDARHOLMEN, STOCKHOLM.]

In saying that Stockholm is not picturesque one may seem to have
spoken disparagingly, but, nevertheless, it is perfectly charming:
there is so much life and movement upon its blue waters, and its many
little public gardens give such a gay aspect to the buildings. Of
these, the chief is the Kongsträgården, surrounding a statue of Charles
XIII., where the pleasant Café Blanche is filled all the evening with
an animated crowd, gossiping and eating ices under the verandah and
shrubberies, and listening to the music. While we were staying in
Stockholm a hundred Upsala students came in their white caps to sing
national melodies in the Catherina Church. We lived through two hours
of fearful heat to hear them, and most beautiful it was. King Oscar II.
was present—a noble royal figure and handsome face. He is the ideal
sovereign of the age—artist, poet, musician, student, equally at home
in ancient and modern languages, profoundly versed in all his duties,
and nobly performing them.

We had intended going often, as the natives do, to dine amongst
the trees and flowers at Hasselbacken, in the Djurgården, a wooded
promontory, to which little steamers are always plying, but, alas!
during eight of the ten July days we spent at Stockholm it rained
incessantly. We were so cold that we were thankful for all the winter
clothes we brought with us, and were filled with pity for the poor
Swedes in being cheated out of their short summer, of which every day
is precious. The streets were always sopping, but, in the covered
gondolas, we managed several excursions to quiet, damp palaces on the
banks of lonely fiords—Rosendal, remarkable for a grand porphyry vase
in a brilliant little flower garden; and Ulriksdal, with its clipped
avenues and melancholy creek.

Our limited knowledge of Swedish often caused us to embark in amusing
ignorance as to whither we were going, and led us into many a surprise.
One day we set off, intending to go to Drottningholm, but, on reaching
the quay, found the steamer just gone. At that moment such a fearful
storm of rain came on that we were obliged to rush for shelter wherever
we could, and the nearest point of refuge was the deck of the steamer
_Mary_, which instantly started. We feared we might be bound for
the Baltic, and, failing to make any one understand us, resolved to
disembark at the first landing-place. But then the rain was worse than
ever, and we allowed ourselves to be carried on down Lake Malar, till
our boat turned into a little creek, and landed us on the pier of a
manufacturing town. We had not reached the end of the pier, however,
before the rain came on again in such convulsive torrents that we fled
back to the _Mary_, which again started on its travels, and this time,
after stopping at many little ports, conveyed us back to Stockholm.
When we asked the captain what we were to pay for our voyage, he said,
'Oh, nothing;' and very much amused he and his crew seemed to be by our
ignorance and adventures.

[Illustration: THE GRAVES OF THE GODS.]

We had a fine day for our excursion by railway to Upsala, whence we
hired a little carriage to take us on to Old Upsala, about three
miles distant. A drive across a dull, marshy plain brings one to a
delightfully wild district of downs, covered with hundreds of little
sepulchral mounds like Wiltshire barrows, amid which three great
tumuli, standing close together, are said to mark the graves of Odin,
Thor, and Freya—heroes in their lifetime, gods in their death. Close
beside them for centuries rose the temple which was the most sacred
shrine of Scandinavian worship. It glittered all over with gold, and
a golden chain, nine hundred ells in circumference, ran round its
roof. In the temple were three statues, around which hovered all the
principal mythological traditions of the north. The central figure was
that of Odin or Wodan, the wizard-king, who is said to have come in
the dawn of Swedish history from his domains of Asir, which extended
from the Euxine to the Caspian, and whose capital was Asgard. He
landed in Funen, where he founded Odense, and left his son Skjöld as a
sovereign. Thence he passed into Sweden, and established his government
at Sigtuna, not far from Upsala. His existence is affirmed by the Saxon
Chronicle. He was called 'the Father of Victory,' for if he laid his
hands on the heads of his generals, and predicted their success when
they went out to battle, that success never failed them. He was also,
says Snorro Sturlesen, 'the Father of all the arts of modern Europe.'
Tradition has endowed him with every miraculous power. He could change
his looks at pleasure—to his friends most beautiful, but a demon to
his enemies. By his eloquence he captivated all who heard him, and
as he always spoke in verse he was called 'the Artificer of Song.'
His verses were endowed with such magic power that they could strike
his enemies with blindness or deafness, or could blunt their weapons.
To listen to the sweetness of his music even the ghosts would come
forth and the mountains would unfold their inmost recesses. He was
the inventor of Runic characters. He could slaughter thousands at a
blow, and he could render his own followers invulnerable. At his will
he could assume the form of beasts; at his word the fire would cease
to burn, the wind to blow, or the sea to rage. If he hurled his spear
between two armies, it secured victory to those on whose side it fell.
The dwarfs (Lapps) had built for him a ship called _Skidbladner_, in
which he could cross the most dangerous seas with safety; but when
he did not want to use it, he could fold it up like a handkerchief.
Everything was known to Odin, for did he not possess the mummified head
of his enemy Mimir, which was all-wise, and he had only to consult it?
Yet, with all these gifts and attributes, Odin remained human; he had
no power over death. When he felt his end approaching he assembled
all his friends and followers, and, giving himself nine wounds in
a circle, allowed himself to bleed to death. The body of the great
chieftain was burnt, and his ashes were buried under the mound of
Upsala; but his spirit was believed to have gone back to the marvellous
home in the Valhalla of Asgard, of which he had so often spoken, and
whither he had always said that he should return. Henceforward it was
considered that all blessings and mercies were gifts sent by Odin.
The younger Edda tells that all who die in battle are Odin's adopted
children. The Valkyriae pick them out upon the battle-field and conduct
them to the Valhalla, where they have perpetual life in the halls
of Odin. Their days are spent in hunting or the joys of imaginary
combats, and they return at night to feast upon the inexhaustible
flesh of the boar Sahrimnir, and to drink, out of horn cups, the mead
formed from the milk of a single goat, which is strong enough nightly
to intoxicate all the heroes. Huge logs constantly burn within the
palace of Odin, for warmth is the northern idea of heaven, while in
their hell it is eternal winter. When a Scandinavian chieftain died in
battle, not only were his war-horse and all his gold and silver placed
upon his funeral-pyre, but all his followers slew themselves that he
might enter the halls of Odin properly attended. The more glorious the
chieftain the greater the number who must accompany him to Valhalla.
To rejoin Odin in Asgard became the height of a warrior's ambition.
It is recorded of Ragnar Lodbrok that when he was dying no word of
lamentation was heard from him: on the contrary, he was transported
with joy as he thought of the feast preparing for him in Odin's
palace. 'Soon, soon,' he exclaimed, 'I shall be seated in the pleasant
habitation of the gods, and drinking mead out of carved horns! A brave
man does not dread death, and I shall utter no word of fear as I enter
the halls of Odin.' But stranger than all the legends concerning Odin
is the fact that his memory is still so far fresh that 'Go to Odin' is
yet used by the common people where an uncivil wish as to the lower
regions would find expression in England. The fourth day of the week
still commemorates Odin or Wodan—in old Norse Odinsdgr, in Swedish and
Danish Onsdag, in English Wednesday.

On the right hand of Odin, in the temple of Upsala, sate the statue of
Freyja, or Freyer, represented as a hermaphrodite, with the attributes
of productiveness. Freyja was the goddess of love, who rode in a car
drawn by wild cats. She knew beforehand all that would happen, and
divided the souls of the dead with Odin. She is commemorated in the
sixth day of the week, that Freytag or Freyja's Day which in Latin is
Dies Veneris, or Venus' Day.

On the left of Odin sate Thor, who, says the Edda, was 'the most
valiant of the sons of Odin.' He was the offspring of Odin and Frigga,
'the mother of the gods,' and the brother of 'Balder the Beautiful.' As
the defender and avenger of the gods, he was represented as carrying
the hammer with which he destroyed the giants, and which always
returned to his hand when he threw it. He wore iron gauntlets, and had
a girdle which doubled his strength when he put it on. The fifth day
of the week was sacred to Thor, in old Norse Thórsdag, in Swedish and
Danish Torsdag, in English Thursday; in Latin Dies Jovis, for Jupiter,
the God of Thunder, had the same attributes as Thor.

There were three great festivals at Upsala, when multitudes flocked to
the temple to consult its famous oracles or to sacrifice. The first was
the winter festival of 'Mother Night'—saturnalia in honour of Frey,
or the sun, to invoke the blessings of a fruitful year; the second
feast was in honour of the Earth; the third was in honour of Odin, to
propitiate the Father of Battles. Every ninth year, at least, the king
and all persons of distinction were expected to appear before the great
temple, and nine victims were chosen for human sacrifice—captives in
time of war, slaves in time of peace—'I send thee to Odin' being the
consolatory last words spoken to each as he fell. If public calamities
had been caused by any royal mismanagement, the people chose their king
as a sacrifice; thus the first king of the petty province of Vermeland
was burnt to appease Odin during a famine. It is also recorded that
King Aun sacrificed his nine sons to obtain a prolongation of his own
life. The victims were either hewn down or burnt in the temple itself,
or hung in the grove adjoining—'Odin's Grove'—of which every leaf was
sacred. Still, according to the Voluspa, the famous prophecy of Vela,
at the end of the world even Odin, with all the other pagan deities,
will perish in the general chaos, when a new earth of celestial beauty
will arise upon the ruins of the old.

[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF OLD UPSALA.]

One of the most curious little churches in Christendom now stands upon
the site of the ancient temple. The apse is evidently built out of the
pagan sanctuary. The belfry, Swedish-fashion, is detached, built of
massive timbers and painted bright red. There are scarcely any human
habitations near, only the mighty barrows, overgrown with wild thyme
and a thousand other flowers, which rise over the graves of the gods.
In the tomb of Odin the Government still gives the mead, which was the
nectar of Scandinavian heroes, to pilgrim visitors.

Like most of the Swedish towns, Upsala is disappointing, and its mean,
ill-paved streets show few signs of antiquity. At the east end of the
cathedral is the lofty tomb of Gustavus Wasa, the first Protestant
King of Sweden, whose effigy lies between the charming figures of
his two pretty little wives. In 1519 he was carried off as a hostage
by that Christian, King of Denmark, who forcibly made himself King
of Sweden also, and ruled with savage tyranny. Escaping to Lübeck,
he headed a revolutionary party against the tyrant, and, after many
defeats, succeeded in taking Stockholm, where he was made king in 1523.
Soon after, Olaf Petri's translation of the New Testament led to the
Reformation in Sweden, where Gustavus Wasa was another Henry VIII., in
taking the opportunity of seizing two-thirds of the Church revenues,
and depriving all ecclesiastics of their incomes if they refused to
embrace Lutheranism. One of his daughters-in-law was the famous Polish
princess, Queen Catherine Jagellonica, who tried hard to upset the new
religion, and inculcated Catholicism upon her son, King Sigismund, who
was deposed, on religious grounds, in favour of his uncle, Charles IX.,
the father of Gustavus Adolphus. This Queen Catherine Jagellonica has
a fine tomb in a side chapel of Upsala Cathedral.

[Illustration: GRIPSHOLM.]

On a brilliant July morning we embarked at Stockholm in the steamer
which runs twice a week down Lake Malar to Gripsholm. Most lovely were
the long reaches of still water with their fringe of russet rocks,
every crevice tufted with birch and dwarf mountain ash, opening here
and there to show some red timber houses or a wooden spire. It was
several hours of soft diorama, with the music of the pines, before the
great castle of Gripsholm, the Windsor of Sweden, came in sight, with
its many red towers and Eastern-looking domes and cupolas. We were
landed at the little pier of Mariefred, in itself a lovely scene, with
old trees feathering into the water, and a picturesque church rising
in a grove of walnuts on a green hill behind. Hard by is a little inn
where the whole of the passengers in the steamer dined together, at
many little tables, the great staple of food being fresh trout and
salmon of the lake, the bilberries and cloudberries of the rocks, and
the birch brandy and wild strawberries from the woods. After dinner
every one trooped along the meadow paths to the castle, and rambled
in friendly companionship over its numerous rooms, full of interest,
and with many curious royal portraits and pieces of ancient furniture.
There are endless historic recollections connected with Gripsholm,
but they centre for the most part around the sons of Gustavus Wasa.
Of these, John was immured here by Eric XIV., with his wife Catherine
Jagellonica, who, during her imprisonment, gave birth to her son
Sigismund (afterwards Sigismund III. of Poland), in a box-bed which
still remains. Eric intended to have put his brother to death, but
when he entered his cell for the purpose was so overcome by fraternal
feeling that he begged his pardon instead. That pardon was not granted,
for when John got the upper hand he imprisoned Eric in a small chamber
at the top of the castle, where he languished for ten years, during
which he wrote a treatise on military art, and translated the history
of Johannes Magnus, and where—in the end—he was poisoned.




_IN NORWAY._


The weather changed to a cloudless sunshine, which hatched all the
mosquitoes, as we entered Norway in the second week in July, and the
heat was so intense that, in the long railway journey from Stockholm,
we were very thankful for the little tank of iced water with which
each railway carriage is provided. We were disappointed in Kristiania,
which is a very dull place. The town was built by Christian IV. of
Denmark, and has a good central church of his time, but it is utterly
unpicturesque. In the picture gallery are several noble works of
Tidemann, the special painter of expression and pathos. As a companion
for life is the memory of a picture which represents the administration
of the last sacrament to an old peasant, whose wife's grief is turned
to resignation, which ceases even to have a wish for his retention, as
she beholds the heaven-born comfort with which he is looking into an
unknown future. Another of the finest works of the artist represents
the reception of the sacrament by a convict, young and deeply
repentant, before his execution.

There is no striking scenery in the environs of Kristiania, but they
are wonderfully pretty. From the avenues upon the ramparts you look
down over the broad expanse of the fyord, with low blue mountain
distances. Little steamers dart backwards and forwards, and convey
visitors in a few minutes across the bay to Oscars Halle, a tower and
small country villa of the king on a wooded knoll.

We went by the railway which winds high amongst the hills to Kongsberg,
a mining village in a lofty situation. Here, in a garden of white
roses, there is a most comfortable small hotel kept by a Dane, which
is a capital starting-point for all expeditions in Telemarken. There
is a pretty waterfall near the village, and the church should be
visited, for the sake of its curious pulpit hour-glass—indeed, four
glasses—quarter, half-hour, three-quarters, hour—and the top of a
stool let into the wall with an inscription saying that Mr. Jacobus
Stuart, King of Scotland (James I. of England), sate upon it, Nov. 25,
1589, to hear a sermon preached by Mr. David Lentz, 'between 11 and
12,' on 'The Lord is my Shepherd.'

We engaged a carriage at Kongsberg for the excursion to Tinoset, whence
we arranged to go on to the Ryukan Foss, said to be the highest
waterfall in Europe. We do not advise future travellers without
unlimited time to follow us in the latter part of the expedition by
the lake, but the carriage excursion is quite enchanting. What an
exquisite drive it is through the forest—the deep ever-varying woods
of noble pines and firs springing from luxuriant thickets of junipers,
bilberries, and cranberries! The loveliest mountain flowers grow in
these woods—huge larkspurs of rank luxuriant foliage and flowers
of faint dead blue; pinks and blue lungworts and orchids; stagmoss
wreathing itself round the grey rocks, and delicate, lovely soldanella
drooping in the still recesses.

Our midday halt was at Bolkesjö, where the forest opens to green
lawns, hill-set, with a charming view down the smooth declivities to
a many-bayed lake, with mountain distances. Here, amid a group of old
brown farm-buildings covered with rude paintings and sculpture, is a
farmhouse, inhabited by the same family through many generations. It
is one of the 'stations' where it is part of the duty of the farmer
or 'bonder' who is owner of the soil to find horses for the use of
travellers. These horses are supplied at a very trifling charge, and
are brought back by a boy who sits behind the carriole or carriage
upon the portmanteau: but as the horses, when not called for, are
turned loose or used by the bonder in his own farm or field work,
travellers generally have to wait a long time while they are caught
or sent for. They order their horses '_strax_'—directly—one of the
first words an Englishman learns to use on entering Norway, yet they
scarcely ever appear before half an hour, so that Norwegians repeat
with amusement the story of an Englishman who, when he wished to spend
an hour at a station, ordered his horses 'after two strax's.' These
halts are not always congenial to English impatience, yet they give
opportunities of becoming acquainted with Norwegian life and people
which can be obtained in no other way, and recollection will oftener
go back to the quiet time spent in waiting for horses amid the grey
rocks above some foaming streamlet, in the green oases surrounded by
forest, or in clean-boarded rooms strewn with fresh fir foliage, than
to the more established sights of Norway. Most delicious indeed were
the two hours which we passed at Bolkesjö, in the high pastures where
the peasants were mowing the tall grass ablaze with flowers, and the
mountains were throwing long purple shadows over the forest, and the
wind blowing freshly from the gleaming lake—and then, most delicious
was the well-earned meal of eggs and bacon, strawberries and cream, and
other homely dainties in the farmhouse where the beams and furniture
were all painted and carved with mottoes and texts, and the primitive
box-beds had crimson satin quilts. Portraits sent by well-pleased royal
visitors hung on the walls side by side with common-coloured scripture
prints, like those which are found in English cottages. The cellar
is under a bed, beneath which it was funny to see the old farmeress
disappear as she went down to fetch up for us her home-brewed ale.

[Illustration: BOLKESJÖ.]

With the cordial 'likkelie reise' of our old hostess in our ears, we
left Bolkesjö full of pleasant thoughts. But what roads, or rather what
want of roads, lead to Tinoset!—there were banks of glassy rock, up
which our horses scrambled like cats; there were awful moments when
everything seemed to come to an end, and when they gathered up their
legs, and seemed to fling themselves down headlong with the carriage on
the top of them, and yet we reached the bottom of the abyss buried in
dust, to rise gasping and gulping and wondering we were alive, to begin
the same pantomime over again.

Late in the evening, long after the sunlight had faded, and when the
forests seemed to have gone to sleep and all sounds were silent, we
reached Tinoset. The inn is a wooden châlet on the banks of a lake with
a single great pine-tree close to the door. It was terribly crowded,
and the little wooden cells were the smallest apology for bedrooms,
where all through the night we heard the winds howling among the
mountains, and the waves lashing the shore under the windows. In the
morning the lake was covered with huge blue waves crested with foam,
and we were almost sorry when the steamer came and we felt obliged to
embark, because, as it was not the regular day for its passage, we
had summoned it at some expense from the other end of the lake. We
were thoroughly wet with the spray before we reached the little inn
at Strand, with a pier where we disembarked, and occupied the rest
of the afternoon in drawing the purple hills, and the road winding
towards them through the old birch-trees. An excursion to the Ryukan
Foss occupied the next day; a dull drive through the plain, and then
an exciting skirting of horrible precipices, followed by a clamber
up a mountain pathlet to a châlet, where we were thankful for our
well-earned dinner of trout and ale before proceeding to the Foss,
the 560-feet-high fall of a mountain torrent into a black rift in the
hills—a boiling, roaring abyss of water, with drifts of spray which
are visible for miles before it can be seen itself.

[Illustration: OLD CHURCH OF HITTERDAL.]

In returning from Tinoset, we took the way by Hitterdal, the
date-forgotten old wooden church so familiar from picture-books. It
had been our principal object in coming to Norway, yet the long drive
had made us so ravenous in search of food that we could only endure
to stay there half an hour. The church, however, is most intensely
picturesque, rising with an infinity of quaintest domes and spires,
all built of timber, out of a rude cloister painted red, the whole
having the appearance of a very tall Chinese pagoda, yet only measuring
altogether 84 feet by 57. The belfry, Norwegian-wise, stands alone
on the other side of the churchyard, which is overgrown with pink
willow-herb. When we reached the inn, as famished as wolves in winter,
we were told by our landlady that she could not give us any dinner.
'Nei, nei,' nothing would induce her—she had too much work on her
hands already—perhaps, however, the woman at the house with the flag
would give us some. So, hungry and faint, we walked forth again to a
house which had a flag flying in front of it, where all was silent and
deserted, except for a dog who received us furiously. Having pacified
him, and finding the front door locked, we made good our entrance at
the back, examined the kitchen, peeped into all the cupboards, lifted
up the lids of all the saucepans, and not till we had searched every
corner for food ineffectually, were met by the pretty, pleasant-looking
young lady of the house, who informed us in excellent English, and
with no small surprise at our conduct, that we had been committing a
raid upon her private residence. Afterwards we discovered a lonely
farmhouse, where there had once been a flag, and where they gave
us a very good dinner, ending in a great bowl of cloudberries—in
which we were joined by two pleasant young ladies and their father,
an old gentleman smoking an enormous long pipe, who turned out
to be the Bishop of Christiansand. The house of the landamann of
Hitterdal contains a relic connected with a picturesque story quaintly
illustrative of ancient Scandinavian life. It is an axe, with a handle
projecting beyond the blade, and curved, so that it can be used as a
walking-stick. Formerly it belonged to an ancient descendant of the
Kongen, or chieftains of the district, who insisted upon carrying it to
church with him in accordance with an old privilege. The priest forbade
the bearing of the warlike weapon into church, which so much affected
the old man that he died. His son, who thought it necessary to avenge
his father's death, went to the priest with the axe in his hands,
and demanded the most precious thing he possessed—when the priest
brought his Bible and gave it to him, open upon a passage exhorting to
forgiveness of injuries.

[Illustration: THRONDTJEM FYORD.]

On July 25 we left Kristiania for Throndtjem—the whole journey
of three hundred and sixty miles being very comfortable, and only
costing 30 francs. The route has no great beauty, but endless pleasant
variety—rail to Eidswold, with bilberries and strawberries in pretty
birch-bark baskets for sale at all the railway stations; a vibrating
steamer for several hours on the long, dull Miosen lake; railway again,
with some of the carriages open at the sides; then an obligatory night
at Koppang, a large station, where accommodation is provided for every
one, but where, if there are many passengers, several people, strangers
to each other, are expected to share the same room. On the second day
the scenery improves, the railway sometimes running along and sometimes
over the river Glommen, on a wooden causeway, till the gorge of
mountains opens beyond Stören, into a rich country with turfy mounds
constantly reminding us of the graves of the hero-gods of Upsala.
Towards sunset, beyond the deep cleft in which the river Nid runs
between lines of old painted wooden warehouses, rises the burial-place
of S. Olaf, the shrine of Scandinavian Christianity, the stumpy-towered
cathedral of Throndtjem. The most northern railway station and the most
northern cathedral in Europe!

[Illustration: THRONDTJEM CATHEDRAL.]

Surely the cradle of Scandinavian Christianity is one of the most
beautiful places in the world! No one had ever told us about it, and we
went there only because it is the old Throndtjem of sagas and ballads,
and expecting a wonderful and beautiful cathedral. But the whole place
is a dream of loveliness, so exquisite in the soft silvery morning
light on the fyord and delicate mountain ranges, the rich nearer hills
covered with bilberries and breaking into steep cliffs—that one
remains in a state of transport, which is at a climax while all is
engraven upon an opal sunset sky, when an amethystine glow spreads over
the mountains, and when ships and buildings meet their double in the
still, transparent water. Each wide street of curious low wooden houses
displays a new vista of sea, of rocky promontories, of woods dipping
into the water; and at the end of the principal street is the grey
massive cathedral where S. Olaf is buried, and where northern art and
poetry have exhausted their loveliest and most pathetic fancies around
the grave of the national hero.

The 'Cathedral Garden,' for so the graveyard is called, is most
touching. Acres upon acres of graves are all kept—not by officials,
but by the families they belong to—like gardens. The tombs are
embowered in roses and honeysuckle, and each little green mound has
its own vase for cut flowers daily replenished, and a seat for the
survivors, which is daily occupied, so that the link between the dead
and the living is never broken.

Christianity was first established in Norway at the end of the tenth
century by King Olaf Trygveson, son of Trygve and of the lady Astrida,
whose romantic adventures, when sold as a slave after her husband's
death, are the subject of a thousand stories. When Olaf succeeded to
the throne of Norway after the death of Hako, son of Sigurd, in 996, he
proclaimed Christianity throughout his dominions, heard matins daily
himself, and sent out missionaries through his dominions. But the duty
of the so-called missionaries had little to do with teaching, they were
only required to baptize. All who refused baptism were tortured and put
to death. When, at one time, the estates of the province of Throndtjem
tried to force Olaf back to the old religion, he outwardly assented,
but made the condition that the offended pagan deities should in that
case be appeased by human sacrifice—the sacrifice of the twelve nobles
who were most urgent in compelling him; and upon this the ardour of the
chieftains for paganism was cooled, and they allowed Olaf unhindered to
demolish the great statue of Thor, covered with gold and jewels, in the
centre of the province of Throndtjem, where he founded the city then
called Nidaros, upon the river Nid.

No end of stories are narrated of the cruelties of Olaf Trygveson.
When Egwind, a northern chieftain, refused to abandon his idols,
he first attempted to bribe him, but, when gentler means failed, a
chafing-dish of hot coals was placed upon his belly till he died. Raude
the magician had a more horrible fate: an adder was forced down a horn
into his stomach, and left to eat its way out again!

The first Christian king of Norway was an habitual drunkard, and, by
twofold adultery, he, the husband of Godruna, married Thyra of Denmark,
the wife of Duke Borislaf of Pomerania. This led to a war with Denmark
and Sweden, whose united fleets surrounded him near Stralsund. As much
mystery enshrouds the story of his death as is connected with that of
Arthur, Barbarossa, or Harold: as his royal vessel, the _Long Serpent_,
was boarded by the enemy, he plunged into the sea and was no more seen,
though some chroniclers say that he swam to the shore in safety and
died afterwards at Rome, whither he went on pilgrimage.

Olaf Trygveson had a godson Olaf, son of Harald Grenske and Asta,
who had the nominal title of king given to all sea captains of royal
descent. From his twelfth year, Olaf Haraldsen was a pirate, and he
headed the band of Danes who destroyed Canterbury and murdered S.
Elphege—a strange feature in the life of one who has been himself
regarded as a saint since his death. By one of the strange freaks of
fortune common in those times, this Olaf Haraldsen gained a great
victory over the chieftain Sweyn, who then ruled at Nidaros, and,
chiefly through the influence of Sigurd Syr, a great northern landowner
who had become the second husband of his mother, he became seated in
1016 upon the throne of Norway. His first care was for the restoration
of Christianity, which had fallen into decadence in the sixteen years
which had elapsed since the defeat of Olaf Trygveson. The second Olaf
imitated the violence and cruelty of his predecessor. Whenever the new
religion was rejected, he beheaded or hung the delinquents. In his
most merciful moments he mutilated and blinded them: 'he did not spare
one who refused to serve God.' After fourteen years of unparalleled
cruelties in the name of religion, he fell in battle with Canute the
Great at Sticklestadt. He had abducted and married Astrida, daughter
of the King of Sweden, but by her he had no children. By his concubine
Alfhilda he left an only son, who lived to become Magnus the Good,
King of Norway. There is a very fine story of the way in which Magnus
obtained his name. Olaf had said, 'I very seldom sleep, and if I ever
do it will be the worse for any one who awakens me.' Whilst he was
asleep Alfhilda's child was born. Then the King's scald or poet and
Siegfried the mass priest debated together as to whether they should
awaken him. At first they thought they would; then the poet said, 'No;
I know him better than that: he must not be awakened.' 'That is all
very well,' said the priest, 'but the child must be baptised at once.
What shall we call him?' 'Oh,' said the scald, 'I know that the King
said that the child should be named after the greatest monarch that
ever lived, and his name was Magnus,' for he only remembered one part
of the name. So they called him Magnus.

When the King woke up he was furious. 'Who can have dared to do this
thing—to christen the child without consulting me, and to give him
this outlandish name, which is no name at all—who can have dared to do
it?'

Then the mass priest was terrified and shrank into his shoes, but the
scald answered boldly, 'I did it, and I did it because it was better to
send two souls to God than one soul to the devil; for if the child had
died unbaptised it would have been lost, but if you kill Siegfried and
me we shall go straight to heaven.'

And then King Olaf thought he would say no more about it.

However terrible the cruelties of Olaf Haraldsen were in his lifetime,
they were soon dazzled out of sight amid the halo of miracles with
which his memory was encircled by the Roman Catholic Church. It was
only recollected that when, according to the legend, he raced for the
kingdom with his half-brother Harald, in his good ship the _Ox_,

    Saint Olaf, who on God relied,
    Three days the first his house descried;

after which

    Harald so fierce with anger burned
    He to a lothely dragon turned;

but because

    A pious zeal Saint Olaf bore,
    He long the crown of Norway wore.

His admirers narrated that when he was absently cutting chips from
a stick with his knife on a Sunday, a servant passed him with the
reproof, 'Sir, it is Monday to-morrow,' when he placed the sinful chips
in his hand, and, setting them on fire, bore the pain till they were
all consumed. It was remembered that as he walked to the church which
Olaf Trygveson had founded at Nidaros, he 'wore a glory in his yellow
hair.' And gradually he became the most popular saint of Scandinavia.
His shirt was an object of pilgrimage in the Church of S. Victor
at Paris, and many churches were dedicated to him in England, and
especially in London, where Tooley Street still records his familiar
appellation of S. Tooley.

It was when the devotion to S. Olaf was just beginning that Earl Godwin
and his sons were banished from England for a time. Two of these,
Harold and Tosti, became vikings, and, in a great battle, they vowed
that, if they were victorious, they would give half the spoil to the
shrine of S. Olaf; and a huge silver statue, which they actually gave,
existed at Throndtjem till 1500, and if it existed still would be one
of the most important relics in archæology. The old Kings of Norway
used to dig up the saint from time to time and cut his nails. When
Harold Hardrada was going to England, he declared that he must see S.
Olaf once again. 'I must see my brother once more,' he said, and he
also cut the saint's nails. But he also thought that from that time it
would be better that no one should see his brother any more—it would
not be for the good of the Church—so he took the keys of the shrine
and threw them into the fyord; at the same time however, he said it
would be good for men in after-ages to know what a great king was like,
so he caused S. Olaf's measure to be engraved upon the wall in the
church at Throndtjem—his measure of seven feet—and there it is still.

[Illustration: S. OLAF'S WELL.]

Around the shrine of Olaf in Throndtjem, in which, in spite of Harold
Hardrada, his 'incorrupt body' was seen more than five hundred years
after his death, has arisen the most beautiful of northern cathedrals,
originating in a small chapel built over his grave within ten years
after his death. The exquisite colour of its green-grey stone adds
greatly to the general effect of the interior, and to the delicate
sculpture of its interlacing arches. From the ambulatory behind the
choir opens a tiny chamber containing the Well of S. Olaf, of rugged
yellow stone, with the holes remaining in the pavement through which
the dripping water ran away when the buckets were set down. Amongst the
many famous Bishops of Throndtjem, perhaps the most celebrated has been
Anders Arrebo, 'the father of Danish poetry' (1587-1637), who wrote
the 'Hexameron,' an extraordinarily long poem on the Creation, which
nobody reads now. The cathedral is given up to Lutheran worship, but
its ancient relics are kindly tended and cared for, and the building
is being beautifully restored. Its beautiful Chapter House is lent for
English service on Sundays.

In the wide street which leads from the sea to the cathedral is the
'Coronation House,' the wooden palace in which the Kings and Queens of
Sweden and Norway stay when they come hither to be crowned. Hither the
present beloved Queen, Sophie of Nassau, came in 1873, driving herself
in her own carriole from the Romsdal, in graceful compliance with
the popular mode of Norwegian travel. It is because even the finest
buildings in Norway are generally built of wood that there are so few
of any real antiquity. Near the shore of the fyord, the custom-house
occupies the site of the Orething, where the elections of twenty kings
have taken place. It is sacred ground to a King of Norway, who passes
it bareheaded. The familiar affection with which the Norwegians regard
their sovereigns can scarcely be comprehended in any other country.
To their people they are 'the father and mother of the land.' The
broken Norse is remembered at Throndtjem in which King Carl Johann
begged people 'to make room for their old father' when they pressed too
closely upon him. When the present so beloved Queen drove herself to
her coronation, the people met her with flowers at all the 'stations'
where the horses were changed. 'Are you the mother of the land?' they
said. 'You look nice, but you must do more than look nice; that is not
the essential.' One old woman begged the lady in waiting to beg her
majesty to get upon the roof of the house. 'Then we should all see
her.' At Throndtjem the peasants touchingly and affectionately always
addressed her as 'Du.'

In returning from Throndtjem we left the railway at Stören, where we
engaged a double carriole, and a carriage for four with a pleasant boy
called Johann as its driver, for the return journey. It was difficult
to obtain definite information about anything, English books being
almost useless from their incorrectness, and we set off with a sort of
sense of exploring an unknown country. At every 'station' we changed
horses, which were sent back by the boy, who perched upon the luggage
behind, and we marked our distances by calling our horses after the
Kings of England. Thus, setting off from Stören with William the
Conqueror, we drove into the Romsdal with Edward VI. After a drive
with Lady Jane Grey, we set off again with Mary. But the Kings of
England failed us long before our driving days were over, and we used
up all the Kings of Rome also. As we were coming down a steep hill into
Lillehammer with Tarquinius Superbus, something gave way and he quietly
walked out of the harness, leaving us to run briskly down-hill and
subside into the hedge. We captured Tarquinius, but how to put him in
again was a mystery, as we had never harnessed a horse before. However,
by trying every strap in turn we got him in somehow, and escaped the
fate of Red Riding Hood amid the lonely hills.

For a great distance after leaving Stören there is little especially
striking in the scenery, except one gorge of old weird pine-trees in a
rift of purple mountains. After you emerge upon the high Dovre-Fyeld,
the huge ranges of Sneehatten rise snowy, gleaming, and glorious, above
the wide yellow-grey expanse, hoary with reindeer moss, though, as the
Dovre-Fyeld is itself three thousand feet high, and Sneehatten only
seven thousand three hundred, it does not look so high as it really is.
Next to Throndtjem itself, the old ballads and songs of Norway gather
most thickly around the Dovre-Fyeld. It is here that the witches are
supposed to hold their secret meetings at their Blokulla, or black
hill. Across these yellow hills of the Jerkin-Fyeld the prose Edda
describes Thor striding to his conflict with the dragon Jormangandur
'by Sneehatten's peak of snow,' where 'the tall pines cracked like a
field of stubble under his feet;' and here, according to the ancient
fragment called the ballad of 'The Twelve Wizards,' as given in Prior's
'Ancient Danish Ballads'—

        At Dovrefeld, over on Norway's reef,
        Were heroes who never knew pain or grief.

        There dwelt there many a warrior keen,
        The twelve bold brothers of Ingeborg queen.

        The first with his hand the storm could hush
        The second could stop the torrent's rush.

        The third could dive in the sea as a fish;
        The fourth never wanted meat on dish.

        The fifth he would strike the golden lyre,
        And young and old to the dancing fire.

        The sixth on the horn would blow a blast,
        Who heard it would shudder and stand aghast.

        The seventh go under the earth could he;
        The eighth he could dance on the rolling sea.

        The ninth tamed all that in greenwood crept;
        The tenth not a nap had ever slept.

        The eleventh the grisly lindworm bound,
        And will what he would, the means he found.

        The twelfth he could all things understand,
        Though done in a nook of the farthest land.

        Their equals were never seen there in the North,
        Nor anywhere else on the face of the earth.

In spite of great fatigue from the distances to be accomplished, each
day's journey in carriage or carriole has its peculiar charms, the
going on and on into an unknown land, meeting no one, sleeping in odd,
primitive, but always clean rooms, setting off again at half-past five
or six, and halting at comfortable stations, with their ever-moderate
prices and their cheery farm-servants, who kissed our hands all
round on receiving the very smallest gratuity—a coin meaning
twopence-halfpenny being a source of ecstatic bliss.

The 'bonders,' who keep the stations, generally themselves represent
the gentry of the country, the real gentry filling the position of the
English aristocracy. The bonders are generally very well off, having
small tithes, good houses, boundless fuel, a great variety of food,
and continual change of labour on their own small properties. Their
wives, who never walk, have a sledge for winter, and a carriole and
horse to take them to church in summer. In the many months of snow,
when the cows and horses are all stabled in the 'laave,' and when
out-of-door occupations fail, they occupy the time with household
pursuits—carpentering, tailoring, or brewing. When a bonder dies, his
wife succeeds to his property until her second marriage; then it is
divided amongst his children.

The 'stations' or farmhouses are almost entirely built of wood, but
those of a superior class have a single room of stone, used only in
bridals or births, a custom handed down from old times when a place of
special safety was required at those seasons.

Nine-tenths of the country are covered with pine-forests, but the trees
are always cut down before they grow old. We did not see a single old
tree in Norway. The pines are of two kinds only—the _Furu_, our pine,
_Pinus silvestris_; and the _Gran_, our fir, _Pinus abies_.

Wolves seldom appear except in winter, when those who travel in sledges
are often pursued by them. Then hunger makes them so bold that they
will often snatch a dog from between the knees of a driver.

From the station of Dombaas (where there is a telegraph station and a
shop of old silver) we turned aside down the Romsdal, which soon became
beautiful, as the road wound above the chrysoprase river Rauma, broken
by many rocky islets and swirling into many waterfalls, but always
equally radiant, equally transparent, till its colour is washed out by
the melting snow in a ghastly narrow valley, which we called the Valley
of Death.

The little inn at Aak, in Romsdal, with a large garden stretching
along the hillside, disappointed us at first, as the clouds hid the
mountain-tops, but morning revealed how glorious they are—purple
pinnacles of rock or pathless fields of snow embossed upon a sky which
is delicately blue above but melts into the clearest opal. Grander,
we thought, than any single peak in Switzerland is the tremendous
peak of the Romsdalhorn, and the walks in all directions are most
exquisite—into deep glades filled with columbines and the giant
larkspurs, which are such a feature of Norway: into tremendous mountain
gorges: or to Waeblungsnaes, along the banks of the lovely fyord,
with its marvellously quaint forms of mountain distance. Aak is a
place where a month may be spent most delightfully, as well as most
comfortably and economically.

[Illustration: IN THE ROMSDAL, NORWAY.]

We had heard a great deal before we went to Norway about the difficulty
of getting proper food, but our own experience is that we were never
fed more luxuriously. Perhaps very late in the season the provisions
at the country 'stations' may be somewhat used up, but when we were
there in July only those who could not live without a great deal of
meat could have any cause for complaint, and once a week we generally
had reindeer for a treat. When we arrived in the evenings, we always
found an excellent meal prepared—the most delicious coffee, tea,
and cream; baskets of bread, rusks, cakes and biscuits of various
descriptions; fresh salmon and trout; cloudberries, bilberries,
raspberries, mountain strawberries and cream; and for all this about a
franc and a half is the payment required.

My companions lingered at Kristiania whilst I paid a visit, which is
one of the most delightful recollections of my tour, to a native family
near Moss, at the mouth of the fyord; then we came back to Denmark,
travelling in the same train with the beloved Prince Imperial, who
was then in the height of health and happiness, and received at every
station with the enthusiastic 'Hochs!' which in Scandinavia supply the
place of the English hurrah.


                        LONDON: PRINTED BY
              SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
                      AND PARLIAMENT STREET




                   WORKS BY AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE.


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many excellently witty stories.... Whenever he is describing foreign
life he is at his best; and nothing can exceed the beautiful pathos of
the episodes in which his mother appears. Indeed, he has the gift of
tenderness for all good women and brave men."—_Daily Telegraph._

  "This autobiography could not fail to be exceptionally interesting.
There may be readers who will protest that the more minute details of
daily life might have been abridged with advantage, but the aim of the
book makes this elaborate treatment of the subject indispensable. The
conscientious record of a mental development amid curious surroundings,
would make these volumes valuable if not a single name of note were
mentioned.... Even more interesting than the stories of people and
things that are still remembered are the glimpses of a past which is
quickly fading out of recollection."—_The Standard._

  "The book is unexceptionable on the score of taste.... It is
an agreeable miscellany into which one may dip at random with
the certainty of landing something entertaining, rather than an
autobiography of the ordinary kind. The concluding chapter is full of a
deep and tender pathos."—_The Manchester Guardian._

  "Mr. Hare's style is graceful and felicitous, and his life-history
was well worth writing. The volumes simply teem with good things,
and in a single article we can but skim the surface of the riches
they contain. A word must also be said of the beauty and delicacy of
the illustrations. Few living men dare brave criticism by giving us
the story of their lives and promising more. But Mr. Hare is quite
justified. He has produced a fascinating work, in some parts strange
as any romance, and his reminiscences of great men are agreeable and
interesting."—_Birmingham Gazette._

  "An inexhaustible storehouse of anecdote."—_South-Western News._

  "These volumes possess an almost unique interest because of the
striking series of portraits we get in them, not so much of
celebrities, of whom we often hear enough, but of 'originals' in
private life.... They give us a truly remarkable picture of certain
sections of European society, and, above all, introduce us to some
singularly quaint types of human character."—_Glasgow Herald._

  "Brimful of anecdotes, this autobiography will yield plenty of
entertainment. We should like to quote many a characteristic little
tale, but must content ourselves by heartily recommending all who care
for the pleasantest of pleasant gossip concerning famous people and
places to procure these three volumes."—_Publisher's Circular._

  "Mr. Hare has an easy, agreeable style, and tells a story with humour
and skill."—_The Saturday Review._

  "It would be well for all who think the children of to-day
are over-pampered and too much considered, to read Mr. Hare's
life."—_Lady's Pictorial._

  "Very delicate, idyllic, and fascinating are the pictures the author
has drawn of daily life in old rectories and country houses."—_The
World._

  "Mr. Hare has the gift, the rare gift, of writing about himself
truthfully. Nor can a quick eye for shades of character be denied to
Mr. Hare, who does not seem ready to take people at their own estimate
or even at what may be called their market price. But we do not detect
a touch of malice, but only that knack of telling the truth which is
so hateful to the ordinary biographer, and so distasteful to that
sentimental public which is never so happy as when devouring sugared
falsehoods."—_The Speaker._

  "The book has throughout a strong human interest. It contains a great
many anecdotes, and in our opinion, at all events, deserves to take
rank among notable biographical works."—_Westminster Gazette._

  "A deeply interesting book. It is the story of a man who has seen much
and suffered much, and who out of the fulness of his experience can
bring forth much to interest and entertain.... The book has a wealth
of apt quotations and graceful reference, and though written in a
scholarly and cultured way, it is always simple and interesting....
Nothing in the work has been set down in malice; there are excuses for
everybody.... Of course it is hardly necessary to say that the book
teems with entertainment from beginning to end."—_St. James's Budget._

  "There is much besides human character and incident in these
well-packed and well-illustrated volumes.... No one will close the
work without a feeling not only of gratitude for a long gallery of
interesting and brilliantly-speaking portraits, but of sympathy with
the biographer."—_The Athenæum._

  "It is doubtful whether any Englishman living has had a wider
acquaintance among people worth knowing in England and on the
Continent, than the author of these memoirs. It is also doubtful
whether any man, with equal opportunities, could have turned them to
so good an account.... We have here an incomparable storehouse of
anecdotes concerning conspicuous persons of the first half of this
Victorian age."—_New York Sun._

  "This is assuredly a book to read."—_Freeman._

  "Singularly interesting is this autobiography.... Altogether it is a
notable book, and may well be recommended to those who are interested
in the intellectual life of our time."—_New York Herald._

  "Mr. Hare's excellence, apart from felicity of style and directness
of method, has ever been conspicuous by the excellence that comes of
wide knowledge of his subject, and a keenly sympathetic nature. Alive
as he has ever been to responsive emotion, he possesses also a bright
humour that seizes upon the discrepancies, the nuances and quaintnesses
of whatever comes within the range of his eye and pen. These qualities
have made for Mr. Hare a circle of admirers who, while they have sought
in his pages no very thrilling passages, have felt steadily the growth
of a liking given to an old friend who is always kindly and oftentimes
amusing.... Mr. Hare dwells with a rare and touching love upon his
mother, and these passages are amongst the most appealing in the
book."—_Philadelphia Courier._

  "Mr. Hare has given us a picture of English social life that for
vividness, picturesqueness, and completeness, is not excelled in
literature. There is a charming lack of attempt to be literary in
the telling of the story—a refreshing frankness and quaintness of
expression. He takes his readers with him so that they may breathe the
same social atmosphere in which he has spent his life. With their own
eyes they see the things he saw, and best of all they have freedom to
judge them, for Mr. Hare does not force himself or his opinions upon
them."—_New York Press._

  "Mr. Hare's memoirs are their own excuse for being, and are a
distinct addition to the wide and delightful realm of biographical
literature."—_Chicago Journal._

  "It is rarely that an autobiography is planned on so ample a scale, and
yet, to tell the truth, there are singularly few of these pages which
one really cares to skip."—_Good Words._

  "A sad history of Mr. Hare's childhood and boyhood this is for the
most part, but there were bursts of sunshine in Augustus Hare's
life—sunshine shed around him by the kindly, noble-minded lady who is
called mother all through these volumes, and for whom his reverence and
gratitude deepened with years."—_Clifton Society._

  "The 'Story of My Life' is no commonplace autobiography, and plunge
in where you may, there is something to interest and attract."—_The
Sketch._

  "No one can read these very fascinating pages without feeling that what
their author has written is absolutely that which no other would have
ventured to say of him, and what not one in a million would have told
concerning himself. There is a wonderful charm of sincerity in what he
discloses as to his own feelings, his likes and dislikes, his actions
and trials. He lays open, with photographic fidelity, the story of his
life."—_New York Churchman._

  "These fair volumes might be labelled the Literature of Peace. They
offer an outlook on life observant, and yet detached, from the turmoil
of disillusion."—_New York Times._

  "Mr. Hare has written an autobiography that will not soon be
forgotten."—_Chicago Tribune._

  "The story of Mr. Hare's literary life is most entertaining, and the
charm of the work lies pre-eminently in the pictures of the many
interesting and often famous men and women whom he has known."—_Boston
Congregationalist._

  "Mr. Hare's story is an intensely interesting one, and his style,
which at first appears to be diffuse, is soon seen to be perfectly
well adapted to the writer's purpose.... These volumes are full of
the most valuable and attractive material for the student of human
nature."—_The Book Buyer._

  "Mr. Hare's story contains no touches of egotism, but is always plain,
honest, and straightforward. It is distinctly worth reading."—_London
Literary World._


            _GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD, LONDON_







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