died out of
Holland, never to return, no effort was made to restore it. But it
must, before the storm, have been superb, and of a vastness superior
to any in the country.

I find a very pleasant passage upon Holland's great churches, and
indeed upon its best architecture in general, in an essay on Utrecht
Cathedral by Mr. L.A. Corbeille. "Gothic churches on a grand scale
are as abundant in the Netherlands as they are at home, but to find
one of them drawn or described in any of the otherwise comprehensive
architectural works, which appear from time to time, is the rarest of
experiences. The Hollanders are accused of mere apishness in employing
the Gothic style, and of downright dulness in apprehending its import
and beauty. Yet a man who has found that bit of Rotterdam which beats
Venice; who has seen, from under Delft's lindens on a summer evening,
the image of the Oude Kerk's leaning tower in the still canal,
and has gone to bed, perchance to awake in the moonlight while the
Nieuwe Kerk's many bells are rippling a silver tune over the old
roofs and gables; who has drunk his beer full opposite the stadhuis
at Leyden, and seen Haarlem's huge church across magnificent miles
of gaudy tulips, and watched from a brown-sailed boat on the Zuider
Zee a buoy on the horizon grow into the water-gate of Hoorn; who
knows his Gouda and Bois-le-duc and Alkmaar and Kampen and Utrecht:
this man does not fret over wasted days."

Mr. Corbeille continues, later: "Looking down a side street of
Rotterdam at the enormous flank of St. Lawrence's, and again at
St. Peter's in Leyden, it seems as if all the bricks in the world
have been built up in one place. Apart from their smaller size,
bricks appear far more numerous in a wall than do blocks of stone,
because they make a stronger contrast with the mortar. In the laborious
articulation of these millions of clay blocks one first finds Egypt;
then quickly remembers how indigenous it all is, and how characteristic
of the untiring Hollander, who rules the waves even more proudly
than the Briton, and has cheated them of the very ground beneath his
feet. And if sermons may be found in bricks as well as stones, one has
a thought while looking at them about Christianity itself. Certainly
there is often pitiful littleness and short-comings in the individual
believer, just as each separate brick of these millions is stained
or worn or fractured; and yet the Christian Church, august and
significant,