THE WILD SONGSTER.

      Praise thou the nightingale,
      Who with her joyous tale
      Doth make thy heart rejoice,
    Whether a singing plume she be, or viewless winged voice;

      Whose warblings, sweet and clear,
      Ravish the listening ear
      With joy, as upward float
    The throbbing liquid trills of her enchanted throat;

      Whose accents pure and ripe
      Sound like an organ pipe,
      That holdeth divers songs,
    And with one tongue alone sings like a score of tongues.

      The rise and fall again
      In clear and lovely strain
      Of her sweet voice and shrill,
    Outclamours with its songs the singing springing rill.

      A creature whose great praise
      Her rarity displays,
      Seeing she only lives
    A month in all the year to which her song she gives.

      But this thing sets the crown
      Upon her high renown,
      That such a little bird as she
    Can harbour such a strength of clamorous harmony.

Arnheim presents after dinner the usual scene of contented movement.  The people throng the principal streets, and every one seems happy and placid.  The great concert hall, Musis Sacrum, had not yet begun its season when I was there, and the only spectacle which the town could muster was an exhibition of strength by two oversized boys, which I avoided.

At Arnheim, I should relate, an odd thing happened to my companion.  When she was there last, in 1894, she had need to obtain linseed for a poultice, and visited a chemist for the purpose.  He was an old man, and she found him sitting in the window studying his English grammar.  How long his study had lasted I have no notion, but he knew less of our tongue than she of his, and to get the linseed was no easy matter.  Ten years passed and recollection of the Arnheim chemist had clean evaporated; but chancing to look up as we walked through the town, the sight of the old chemist seated in his shop-window poring over a book brought the whole incident back to her.  We stepped to the window and stole a glance at the volume:  it was an English Grammar.  He had been studying it ever since the night of the linseed poultice.

It was, we felt, an object-lesson to us, who during the same interval had taken advantage of every opportunity of neglecting the Dutch tongue.

That tongue, however, is not attractive.  Even those who have spoken it to most purpose do not always admire it.  I find that Kasper van Baerle wrote:  “What then do we Netherlanders speak?  Words from a foreign tongue:  we are but a collected crowd, of feline origin, driven by a strange fatality to these mouths of the Rhine.  Why, since the mighty descendants of Romulus here pitched their tents, choose we not rather the holy language of the Romans!”

We may consider Dutch a harsh tongue, and prefer that all foreigners should learn English; but our dislike of Dutch is as nothing compared with Dutch dislike of French as expressed in some verses by Bilderdyk when the tyranny of Napoleon threatened them:—­