It is the least Dutch of Dutch towns: the Rhine brings a bosky beauty
to it, German in character and untamed by Dutch restraining hands. The
Dutch Switzerland the country hereabout is called. Arnheim recalls
Richmond too, for it has a Richmond Hill--a terrace-road above a
shaggy precipice overlooking the river.
I walked in the early morning to Klarenbeck, up and down in a vast
wood, and at a point of vantage called the Steenen Tafel looked down
on the Rhine valley. Nothing could be less like the Holland of the
earlier days of my wanderings--nothing, that is, that was around me,
but with the farther bank of the river the flatness instantly begins
and continues as far as one can see in the north.
It was a very beautiful morning in May, and as I rested now and
then among the resinous pines I was conscious of being traitorous to
England in wandering here at all. No one ought to be out of England
in April and May. At one point I met a squirrel--just such a nimble
short-tempered squirrel as those which scold and hide in the top
branches of the fir trees near my own home in Kent--and my sense of
guilt increased; but when, on my way back, in a garden near Arnheim
I heard a nightingale, the treachery was complete.
And this reminds me that the best poem of the most charming figure in
Dutch literature--Tesselschade Visscher--is about the nightingale.
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