The Milan exchange. (Milan, Gibson County, Tenn.) 1874-1978, 1874-10-08
A Walk I'm Amsterdam.

- w 4A8 III AAnoaCA0aAhe
| - 49,
Amsterdam, where / took my first
Dutch walk. is a stately city, even though
its street-vistas do look as If they were
pictured on a tea-caddy or a hand-screen.
They have for the most part broad. slug
gish canal in the middle, on either side OF
which row of perfectly salubriOus, but
extremely attenuated trees grow out of a
highly cultivated soil of compact yellow
bricks. Cultivated call it by proper IL
cense, for il is periodically raked by the
broom and the scrubbing-brush, and re-
| ligiOusly manured with soap-suds. You
lose no time, of course, in drawing the in
evltable parallel between Amsterdam and
Venice, and it is well worth drawing, as
an illustration of the uses to which the
same materials may be put by different
minds. Sky and sea in both cases, with
architecture between winding sea-chan-
nels washing the feet of goodly houses
erected with the profits of trade. And yet
the Dutch city is complete reversal of the
Italian, and its founders might have care
fully studied Venetian effects with the set
purpose of producing exactly the opposite
ones. 1t produces them in the moral line
even more wildly than in the material. 1t
is not that one place is all warm color and
the other all cold; one all simmer and
sOftness and mellow interfusion of every
possible phase of ruin, and the other rig
idity, angularity, opacity, prosperity in
their very essence; ii is more than any
thing that they tell of such different lives
and Of such different view of life. The
outward expression on one side is perfect
poetry, and on the other is perfect prose /;
and the marvel is the way in which thrifty
Amsterdam imparts the prOsaie turn to
things which in Venice seem the perfect
essence of poetry. Take, for instance, the
silence and quiet of the canals it has in
the two places difference of quality which
it is almost impossible to express. In the
one tits the stiffness of order, and in the
other of vacancy-the sleep of idleness and
the sleep of rest; the quiet that comes of
letting everything go by the board, and
the quiet that comes of doing things be-
times and being able to sit with folded
hands and say they are well done
In one of George Eliot's novels
there is portrait of a thrifty farmers
wife who rose so early in the morning
TO do her work that by ten O'Clock it was
all over, and she was at her wits end to
know what to do with her day. This good
woman seems to me an excellent image OF
the genius of Amsterdam as it is reflected
in the house-fronts-I penetrated no deep
er. 1t is impossible to imagine anything
more expressive of the numerous ideas
represented by the French epithet bo,g-
geois than these straight facades of clean
black brick capped with rocco gable of
stone painted white, and armed like the
forehead of the unicorn with little hOri-
Zontal horn-a bracket and pulley for haul
ing stOreable goods into the attic. The IA
nous Dutch cleanliness seem TO me quite
on a level with its reputation, and asserts
itself in the most ingenious and ludicrOus
ways. A rosy seryant-maid, redOlent of
sOapsuds from her white cap to her
white sabots, stands squirting water from
a queer little engine of polished copper
over the majestic front of a genteel man
sion whose complexion is not a visible
shade less immaculate than her own. The
performance suggests dozen questions,
and you can only answer them all with =
laugh. What is she doing, and why is she
doing it? Does she imagine the house has
speck or two which it is of consequence
to remove, or is the squirt applied merely
for purposes of light refreshment, of en-
dearment, as it were? Where could the
speck or two possibly have come from, I'M
less produced by spontaneous generation?
There are no Specks in the road, which is
neat parqtet of secured and polished
brick; nor on the trees, whose trunks are
to al appearances carefully SpOnged every
morning. The speck exists evidently only
as a sort of mathematical point, capable of
extension, in the good wOman's Bava-
rian brain, and the operation with her
copper kettle is, as the metaphvsicianS
would say, purely subjective. 1t is a ne
cessity, not as regards the house, but as
regards her own temperament. OF adoZ-
en- harmlessly Fictitious necessities of the
same sort the canal-sides at Amsterdam
offer lively evidence. Nothing could be
more thoroughly in keeping with the b0lty-
geOts spirit than the way in which YOU
everywhere find this brilliant cleanliness
and ceremOniOus thrift playing the part
not of a convenience, but of restriction
not of a means, but of an end. The win
dOws are Of those huge plates of glass
which offer delectably uninterrupted
field for friction; but they are masked in
ternally by thick white blinds, invariably
drawn, and the only use of their transpar-
ency to any mortal is to enable the passer-
by TO examine the texture of the stuff
The front doors are hedged in with little
square padlOcked barriers, to guard the
lOOrsteps from the pollution of footprints,
anu liiS NlSitOl luuSO Ills anu
apply at an humber portal, with the baker
and the milkman. In such houses must
dwell people whose nerves are proof |
against the irritation of minute precau-
who cover their books with |
white paper and find occasion for weeks |
in a mysterious drop of can
1le-grease on the table-cloth. The trav-
sler with an eye for details will find some
eloquence in the fact that, though the |
canals at Amsterdam and Leyden offer |
this charming pretext of trees |
by a water-side. there is moth their whole |
length a single bench for lounge and
lalf-hOur's aesthetic relish of the situation. |
The traveller in question though, shrewd |
fellow, will not be prevented by the alb |
;ence of benches from getting it, as he
looks up and down and sees the wide green |
Darges come floating through the respect |
able stiffness, and the quaint old scroll |
work Of the gables peep out through the |
meager density of the trees.-THe Nation. |