. 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 carrier, 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
meagre 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.

II.

It can never be satisfactorily ascertained who were the aboriginal
inhabitants. The record does not reach beyond Caesar's epoch, and he
found the territory on the left of the Rhine mainly tenanted by tribes of
the Celtic family. That large division of the Indo-European group which
had already overspread many portions of Asia Minor, Greece, Germany, the
British Islands, France, and Spain, had been long settled in Belgic Gaul,
and constituted the bulk of its population. Checked in its westward
movement by the Atlantic, its current began to flow backwards towards its
fountains, so that the Gallic portion of the Netherland population was
derived from the original race in