The finest ornament of the Hague is its forest; a true wonder of Holland, and one of the most magnificent promenades in the world.  It is a wood of alder-trees, oaks, and the largest beeches that are to be found in Europe, on the eastern side of the city, a few paces from the last fringe of houses, and measuring about one French league in circuit; a truly delightful oasis in the midst of the melancholy Dutch plains.  As you enter it, little Swiss chalets find kiosks, scattered here and there among the first trees, seem to have strayed and lost themselves in an endless and solitary forest.  The trees are as thickly set as a cane-brake, and the alleys vanish in dark perspective.

There are lakes and canals almost hidden under the verdure of their banks; rustic bridges, deserted paths, dim recesses, darkness cool and deep, in which one breathes the air of virgin nature, and feels oneself far from the noises of the world.  This wood, like that of Haarlem, is said to be the remains of an immense forest that covered, in ancient times, almost all the coast, and is respected by the Dutch people as a monument of their national history.

HAARLEM[A]

[Footnote A:  From “Holland of To-day.”]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C.  HARE

A few minutes bring us from Leyden to Haarlem by the railway.  It crosses an isthmus between the sea and a lake which covered the whole country between Leyden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam till 1839, when it became troublesome, and the States-General forthwith, after the fashion of Holland, voted its destruction.  Enormous engines were at once employed to drain it by pumping the water into canals, which carried it to the sea, and the country was the richer by a new province.

Haarlem, on the river Spaarne, stands out distinct in recollection from all other Dutch towns, for it has the most picturesque market-place in Holland—­the Groote Markt—­surrounded by quaint houses of varied outline, amid which rises the Groote Kerk of S. Bavo, a noble cruciform fifteenth-century building.  The interior, however, is as bare and hideous as all other Dutch churches.  It contains a monument to the architect Conrad, designer of the famous locks of Katwijk, “the defender of Holland against the fury of the sea and the power of tempests.”  Behind the choir is the tomb of the poet Bilderijk, who only died in 1831, and near this the grave of Laurenz Janzoom—­the Coster or Sacristan—­who is asserted in his native town, but never believed outside it, to have been the real inventor of printing, as he is said to have cut out letters in wood, and taken impressions from them in ink, as early as 1423.  His partizans also maintain that while he was attending a midnight mass, praying for patience to endure the ill-treatment of his enemies, all his implements were stolen, and that when he found this out on his return he died of grief.