On the left extends a long row of small many-colored steamboats, which start every hour in the day for Dordrecht, Arnhem, Gouda, Schiedam, Brilla, Zealand, and continually send forth clouds of white smoke and the sound of their cheerful bells. To the right lie the large ships which make the voyage to various European ports, mingled with fine three-masted vessels bound for the East Indies, with names written in golden letters,—Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Samarang,—carrying the fancy to those distant and savage countries like the echoes of distant voices. In front the Meuse, covered with boats and barks, and the distant shore with a forest of beech-trees, windmills, and towers; and over all the unquiet sky, full of gleams of light and gloomy clouds, fleeting and changing in their constant movement, as if repeating the restless labor on the earth below.
[ ANTWERP AND ITS PEOPLE.]
ROSE G. KINGSLEY.
[The traveller to whom we owe the following selection makes it part of a paper on “The Home of Rubens,” in which she appreciatively describes that artist’s works. Her account of the city in which the greatest of these works are enshrined is more to our purpose, and is here given.]
It had rained in England for a month without stopping, when, weary of sodden gray clouds above and sodden green grass below, M—— and I determined to seek new sketching-grounds under a more kindly sky. We had but a fortnight to spend on our trip. Where, therefore, could we find a richer field of work than in Flanders? for there quaint cities, beautiful buildings, glorious pictures, and, if we were minded to go deeper, a tangled mass of historic interest, lay within easy reach.
Thus it came to pass that the 30th of September found us driving through the streets of Brussels, and three days later we were steaming out into the (to us) unknown, on our way to Antwerp. Our three days had been chiefly spent in making closer acquaintance with Flemish art in the museum of the capital,—a collection most valuable and typical, a collection too often ignored or hastily glanced through by the tourist, who, if by chance he cares for such things, hurries on to see Memling at Bruges, Van Eyck at Ghent, or Rubens at Antwerp. He forgets, or does not know, that, as Fromentin justly says, “Belgium is a magnificent book of art, of which, happily for provincial glory, the chapters are scattered everywhere, but of which the preface is at Brussels, and only at Brussels. To all who are tempted to skip the preface in order to get at the book, I should say they are wrong,—that they open the book too soon and will read it ill.” We therefore studied the preface with some care, and now were about to turn the first page of the book itself....
Everything seemed new, pretty, and amusing, as the train cleared the last of the suburbs of Brussels. The sun shone on the long lines of poplars, just burnished with autumn’s gold, which cast their shadows on damp green meadows ruled off into squares with almost mathematical precision. Here a man in a brown apron and brilliant crimson sleeves was raking up the aftermath off a water-meadow. There a girl in a blue frock was herding black and white cows, and we began to think of Cuyp. Then we saw, across flat stretches of smiling country, pointed steeples and red roofs, showing behind thick groups of trees in a soft blue haze, while an old windmill on blackened wooden stilts, a little donkey-cart, and a group of crimson-jacketed peasants in the foreground made us think of some of Teniers the Younger’s landscapes, and recollect that we must be close to Drei Torren, his house at Perck. Then came Malines, our first brown canal, with red-sailed, green-and black-painted barges, the great cathedral rising through a screen of trees over scarlet house-roofs, a picturesque crowd on the platform of burly shovel-hatted priests, nuns with black shawls over their white caps, men with blue blouses and brilliant yellow sabots,—and we thought of Prout. It was all so absurdly like what we had expected, with a difference,—just the difference between art and nature.
Then came more flat country, more canals, more fields, more absurd cocky little wheat-ricks, with hardly corn enough in them to make a loaf of bread, more white and purple lupins on the embankments, more red-tiled roofs, half thatch, half tile, which M—— pronounced “most æsthetic,” more sun, yes, that was perhaps the best of all. Then a great green fort, and we were at Antwerp.