AGRICULTURE OX THE RHINE. 7 



or willow so familiar to us from the landscapes of the 

 Dutch masters, give way to continued plantations of 

 osiers and wave-washed banks, that seem to indicate a 

 change of no pleasing kind. The transition is on both 

 banks sudden, from a people whom trade early attracted 

 to the banks of the river and familiarised with its utility, 

 to one almost exclusively agricultural, which long looked 

 wholly to the land for nourishment and power. The 

 face of the country has also changed materially by the 

 time the boat in which you ascend the Rhine reaches 

 the Prussian boundary. The level of the back country 

 has risen considerably above the stream, which may here 

 chafe against the bank without, as in Holland, endan- 

 gering the lives and property of the inhabitants of whole 

 provinces. This change is not perceptible from the 

 river except to the practised eye of the geographer, 

 who recognises, in the circumstance that the stream is 

 confined within a single bed, the existence of rocky 

 strata in the banks, and suspects that it has eaten its way 

 through the lower offsets of some mountain-chain. On 

 the right bank, i. e. on the traveller's left as he ascends 

 the river, the rise is trifling, and a well-cultivated strip 

 of land flanking the river, formerly a portion of the 

 duchy of Cleves, intervenes between the Rhine and the 

 immense heaths which sepai-ate Holland from Germany, 

 to whose extent, untraversed for centuries by roads, the 

 Dutch are indebted for their independent nationality. 



The want of roads in the inland German states gave 

 an early pre-eminence to those districts that commanded 

 water-navigation, and amongst the navigable rivers of 

 Germany the Rhine was prominent. The Lower Rhine, 

 as that portion of the river lying between the Seven 



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