The note of Utrecht is superior satisfaction.  It has discreet verdant parks, a wonderful campanile, a University, large comfortable houses, carriages and pairs.  Its cathedral is the only church in Holland (with the exception of the desecrated fane at Veere) for the privilege of entering which I was not asked to pay.  I have an uneasy feeling that it was an oversight, and that if by any chance this statement meets an authoritative eye some one may be removed to one of the penal establishments and steps be taken to collect my debt.  But so it was.  And yet it is possible that the free right of entrance is intentional; since to charge for a building so unpardonably disfigured would be a hardy action.  The Gothic arches have great beauty, but it is impossible from any point to get more than a broken view on account of the high painted wooden walls with which the pews have been enclosed.

The cathedral is only a fragment; the nave fell in, isolating the bell tower, during a tempest in 1674, and by that time all interest in churches as beautiful and sacred buildings having died out of Holland, never to return, no effort was made to restore it.  But it must, before the storm, have been superb, and of a vastness superior to any in the country.

I find a very pleasant passage upon Holland’s great churches, and indeed upon its best architecture in general, in an essay on Utrecht Cathedral by Mr. L.A.  Corbeille.  “Gothic churches on a grand scale are as abundant in the Netherlands as they are at home, but to find one of them drawn or described in any of the otherwise comprehensive architectural works, which appear from time to time, is the rarest of experiences.  The Hollanders are accused of mere apishness in employing the Gothic style, and of downright dulness in apprehending its import and beauty.  Yet a man who has found that bit of Rotterdam which beats Venice; who has seen, from under Delft’s lindens on a summer evening, the image of the Oude Kerk’s leaning tower in the still canal, and has gone to bed, perchance to awake in the moonlight while the Nieuwe Kerk’s many bells are rippling a silver tune over the old roofs and gables; who has drunk his beer full opposite the stadhuis at Leyden, and seen Haarlem’s huge church across magnificent miles of gaudy tulips, and watched from a brown-sailed boat on the Zuider Zee a buoy on the horizon grow into the water-gate of Hoorn; who knows his Gouda and Bois-le-duc and Alkmaar and Kampen and Utrecht:  this man does not fret over wasted days.”

Mr. Corbeille continues, later:  “Looking down a side street of Rotterdam at the enormous flank of St. Lawrence’s, and again at St. Peter’s in Leyden, it seems as if all the bricks in the world have been built up in one place.  Apart from their smaller size, bricks appear far more numerous in a wall than do blocks of stone, because they make a stronger contrast with the mortar.  In the laborious articulation of these millions of clay blocks one first