e works of the very highest style.
This gallery is admirable--and the city in which the gallery is, is
perhaps even more wonderful and curious to behold than the gallery.

The first landing at Calais (or, I suppose, on any foreign shore)--the
first sight of an Eastern city--the first view of Venice--and this
of Amsterdam, are among the delightful shocks which I have had as a
traveller. Amsterdam is as good as Venice, with a superadded humor and
grotesqueness, which gives the sight-seer the most singular zest and
pleasure. A run through Pekin I could hardly fancy to be more odd,
strange, and yet familiar. This rush, and crowd, and prodigious
vitality; this immense swarm of life; these busy waters, crowding
barges, swinging drawbridges, piled ancient gables, spacious markets
teeming with people; that ever-wonderful Jews' quarter; that dear
old world of painting and the past, yet alive, and throbbing, and
palpable--actual, and yet passing before you swiftly and strangely as a
dream! Of the many journeys of this Roundabout life, that drive through
Amsterdam is to be specially and gratefully remembered. You have never
seen the palace of Amsterdam, my dear sir? Why, there's a marble hall in
that palace that will frighten you as much as any hall in Vathek, or a
nightmare. At one end of that old, cold, glassy, glittering, ghostly,
marble hall there stands a throne, on which a white marble king ought to
sit with his white legs gleaming down into the white marble below, and
his white eyes looking at a great white marble Atlas, who bears on his
icy shoulders a blue globe as big as the full moon. If he were not a
genie, and enchanted, and with a strength altogether hyperatlantean, he
would drop the moon with a shriek on to the white marble floor, and it
would splitter into perdition. And the palace would rock, and heave,
and tumble; and the waters would rise, rise, rise; and the gables
sink, sink, sink; and the barges would rise up to the chimneys; and the
water-souchee fishes would flap over the Boompjes, where the pigeons and
storks used to perch; and the Amster, and the Rotter, and the Saar, and
the Op, and all the dams of Holland would burst, and the Zuyder Zee roll
over the dykes; and you would wake out of your dream, and find yourself
sitting in your arm-chair.

Was it a dream? it seems like one. Have we been to Holland? have we
heard the chimes at midnight at Antwerp? Were we really away for a week,
or have I been sitting u