“Enthusiastic devotion to liberty is one of the greatest charms
of Mr. Motley’s writings.”—_Methodist Quarterly Review._
“Few writers possess a more picturesque and dramatic style, or,
by combined freshness and brilliancy, are more successful in
sustaining the interest of the reader.”—_H. M. Baird, Ph.D._
It is perhaps noteworthy that our four leading American
historians—Bancroft, Hildreth, Motley and Prescott—widely
dissimilar in some of their characteristics, were all born in
Massachusetts, and graduated at Harvard. A writer can do his best
on a theme suited to his taste and genius; and Motley wisely
chose the Netherlands as presenting the spectacle of a noble
people engaged in a heroic work.
Extract from “Rise of the Dutch Republic.”
After giving a vivid description of the three great rivers—the Rhine,
the Meuse, and the Scheld—which for ages had deposited their slime
among the sand banks around their mouths, the historian continues: Such
were the rivers which, with their numerous tributaries, coursed through
the spongy land. Their frequent overflow, when forced back upon their
currents by the stormy sea, rendered the country almost uninhabitable.
Here, within a half-submerged territory, a race of wretched ichthyophagi
dwelt upon _terpen_, or mounds, which they had raised, like beavers,
above the almost fluid soil. Here, at a later day, the same race chained
the tyrant Ocean and his mighty streams into subserviency, forcing them
to fertilize, to render commodious, to cover with a beneficent network of
veins and arteries, and to bind by watery highways with the furthest ends
of the world, a country disinherited by nature of its rights. A region,
outcast of ocean and earth, wrested at last from both domains their
richest treasures. A race, engaged for generations in stubborn conflict
with the angry elements, was unconsciously educating itself for its great
struggle with the still more savage despotism of man.
The whole territory of the Netherlands was girt with forests. An
extensive belt of woodland skirted the sea-coast, reaching beyond the
mouths of the Rhine. Along the outer edge of this barrier, the dunes
cast up by the sea were prevented by the close tangle of thickets from
drifting further inward, and thus formed a breastwork which time and art
were to strengthen. The groves of Haarlem and the Hague are relics of
this ancient forest. The Badahuenna wood, horrid with Druidic sacrifices,
extended along the eastern line of the vanished lake of Flevo. The vast
Hercynian forest, nine days’ journey in breadth, closed in the country
on the German side, stretching from the banks of the Rhine to the remote
regions of the Dacians, in such vague immensity (says the conqueror of
the whole country) that no German, after traveling sixty days, had ever
reached, or even heard of, its commencement. On the south, the famous
groves of Ardennes, haunted by faun and satyr, embowered the country, and
separated it from Celtic Gaul.
Thus inundated by mighty rivers, quaking beneath the level of the ocean,
belted about by hirsute forests, this low land, nether land, hollow land,
or Holland, seemed hardly deserving the arms of the all-accomplished
Roman. Yet, foreign tyranny, from the earliest ages, has coveted this
meager territory as lustfully as it has sought to wrest from their
native possessors those lands with the fatal gift of beauty for their
dower; while the genius of liberty has inspired as noble a resistance to
oppression here as it ever aroused in Grecian or Italian breasts.
Antwerp Cathedral.
The Church of Our Lady, which Philip had so recently converted into a
cathedral, dated from the year 1124, although it may be more fairly
considered a work of the fourteenth century. Its college of canons
had been founded in another locality by Godfrey of Bouillon. The
Brabantine hero, who so romantically incarnated the religious poetry
of his age, who first mounted the walls of redeemed Jerusalem, and
was its first Christian monarch, but who refused to accept a golden
diadem on the spot where the Savior had been crowned with thorns; the
Fleming who lived and was the epic which the great Italian, centuries
afterward, translated into immortal verse, is thus fitly associated
with the beautiful architectural poem which was to grace his ancestral
realms. The body of the church—the interior and graceful perspectives of
which were not liable to the reproach brought against many Netherland
churches, of assimilating themselves already to the municipal palaces
which they were to suggest, was completed in the fourteenth century.
The beautiful façade, with its tower, was not completed till the year
1518. The exquisite and daring spire, the gigantic stem upon which the
consummate flower of this architectural creation was to be at last
unfolded, was a plant of a whole century’s growth. Rising to a height
of nearly five hundred feet, over a church of as many feet in length,
it worthily represented the upward tendency of Gothic architecture.
Externally and internally the cathedral was a true expression of the
Christian principle of devotion. Amid its vast accumulations of imagery,
its endless ornaments, its multiplicity of episodes, its infinite variety
of details, the central, material principle was ever visible. Every thing
pointed upward, from the spire in the clouds to the arch which enshrined
the smallest sculptured saint in the chapels below. It was a sanctuary,
not like pagan temples, to enclose a visible deity, but an edifice where
mortals might worship an unseen being in the realms above.
The church, placed in the center of the city, with the noisy streets
of the busiest metropolis in Europe eddying around its walls, was a
sacred island in the tumultuous main. Through the perpetual twilight,
tall columnar trunks in thick profusion grew from a floor chequered with
prismatic lights and sepulchral shadows. Each shaft of the petrified
forest rose to a preternatural height, their many branches intermingling
in the space above, to form an impenetrable canopy. Foliage, flowers
and fruit of colossal luxuriance, strange birds, beasts, griffins and
chimeras in endless multitudes, the rank vegetation and the fantastic
zoölogy of a fresher or fabulous world, seemed to decorate and to animate
the serried trunks and pendant branches, while the shattering symphonies
or dying murmurs of the organ suggested the rushing of the wind through
the forest—now the full diapason of the storm, and now the gentle cadence
of the evening breeze.