362 Connection of the Physiognomy of a Country, 



heers of the rural. Every Dutchman above the necessity of working to- 

 day for the bread of to-morrow, has his garden-house (Buyteplaats) in 

 the suburbs of his town (for the Dutch population live very much in 

 town surrounded by wet ditches), and repairs to it on Saturday evening 

 with his family, to ruralize until Monday over his pipe of tobacco. Dirk 

 Hatterick, we are told, did so — it is the main extravagance of the Dutch 

 middle-class man, and it is often an expensive one. This garden-house 

 is a wooden box gaily painted, of eight or ten feet square ; its name, 

 " My Delight," or " Rural Felicity," or " Sweet Solitude," stuck up in 

 gilt tin letters on the front ; and situated usually at the end of a narrow 

 slip of ground, enclosed on three sides with well-trimmed hedges and 

 slimy ditches, and overhanging the canal, which forms the boundary of 

 the garden-plot on its fourth side. The slip of land is laid out in flower- 

 beds, all the flowers in one bed being generally of one kind and colour ; 

 and the brilliancy of these large masses of flowers, the white and green 

 paint work, and the gilding about the garden-houses, and a row of those 

 glittering fairy summer lodges, shining in the sun, upon the side of the 

 wide canal, and swimming in human brilliancy in the midst of plots and 

 parterres of splendid flowers, and with the accompaniments of gaily dressed 

 ladies at the windows, swiftly passing pleasure-boats with bright burnished 

 sides below, and a whole city population, afloat or on foot, enjoying them- 

 selves in their holiday clothes, form, in truth, a summer evening scene 

 which one dwells upon with much delight. I pity the taste which can 

 stop to enquire if all this human enjoyment be in good taste or bad taste, 

 vulgar or refined, I stuflT my pipe, hire a boatman to row me in his 

 schuytje up the canal to a tea-garden, and pass the evening as Dutchly 

 and happily as my fellow-man. — Laing't, Notes of a Traveller. 



III. A Midnight Scene on the Ocean. 



One more of the beautiful and poetical pictures which Professor Steffens 

 paints with so vivid yet so soft a touch — once more let us rock our ima- 

 ginations on the bosom of the deep, before we go back to the world of 

 men and things. We know of few attempts in prose or verse to describe 

 the undescribable, the awful majesty, and the profound, mysterious at- 

 traction of the ocean, equal to the following. Our author was good- 

 naturedly invited by a party of six fishermen to accompany them on an 

 expedition to a sand-bank, at a distance of six or seven Norwegian miles 

 from shore, where they were to pass the night. They sailed in a serene 

 and beautiful morning : the wind afterwards rose, and the sea was 

 agitated.* 



" The night I passed there I shall never forget. As twilight closed 

 around us on the tossing waves, we became more and more silent; the 

 masts were lowered ; the fishermen were contented with their day's work, 

 and I now threw out my net once more ; the kind-hearted fellows pressed 



* British and I'oreign Review. 



