In going from Amsterdam by railway to Utrecht, we perceived the canals by which the plains were intersected became fewer and fewer, and finally we began to see crops of grain and potatoes, a sign that we had emerged from the marshes.  We stopped to take a brief survey of Utrecht.  A part of its old cathedral has been converted into a beautiful Gothic church, the rest having been levelled many years ago by a whirlwind.  But what I found most remarkable in the city was its public walks.  The old walls by which Utrecht was once inclosed having been thrown down, the rubbish has formed hillocks and slopes which almost surround the entire city and border one of its principal canals.  On these hillocks and slopes, trees and shrubs have been planted, and walks laid out through the green turf, until it has become one of the most varied and charming pleasure-grounds I ever saw—­swelling into little eminences, sinking into little valleys, descending in some places smoothly to the water, and in others impending over it.  We fell in with a music-master, of whom we asked a question or two.  He happened to know a little German, by the help of which he pieced out his Dutch so as to make it tolerably intelligible to me.  He insisted upon showing us every thing remarkable in Utrecht, and finally walked us tired.

The same evening the diligence brought us to Arnheim, a neat-looking town with about eighteen hundred inhabitants, in the province of Guelderland, where the region retains not a trace of the peculiarities of Holland.  The country west of the town rises into commanding eminences, overlooking the noble Rhine, and I feel already that I am in Germany, though I have yet to cross the frontier.

Letter XXIX.

American Artists Abroad.

Rome, October, 1845.

You would perhaps like to hear what the American artists on the continent are doing.  I met with Leutze at Duesseldorf.  After a sojourn of some days in Holland, in which I was obliged to talk to the Dutchmen in German and get my answers in Dutch, with but a dim apprehension of each other’s meaning, as you may suppose, on both sides; after being smoked through and through like a herring, with the fumes of bad tobacco in the railway wagons, and in the diligence which took us over the long and monotonous road on the plains of the Rhine between Arnheim and Duesseldorf—­after dodging as well as we were able, the English travellers, generally the most disagreeable of the travelling tribe, who swarm along the Rhine in the summer season, it was a refreshment to stop a day at Duesseldorf and take breath, and meet an American face or two.  We found Leutze engaged upon a picture, the subject of which is John Knox reproving Queen Mary.  It promises to be a capital work.  The stern gravity of Knox, the embarrassment of the Queen, and the scorn with which the French damsels of her court regard the saucy Reformer, are extremely well expressed, and tell the story impressively.