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.