an in his dotage. One part, denying its old name, drags itself
as far as Muiden, where it falls into the Zuyder-Zee; the other, with
the name of Old Rhine, or simply the Old, flows slowly to the city
of Leyden, whose streets it crosses almost without giving a sign of
movement, and is finally gathered into one canal by which it goes to
its miserable death in the North Sea.

But it is not many years since this pitiful end was denied it. From
the year 839, in which a furious tempest had accumulated mountains of
sand at its mouth, until the beginning of the present century, the Old
Rhine lost itself in the sand before reaching the sea, and covered a
vast tract of country with pools and marshes. Under the reign of Louis
Bonaparte the waters were collected into a large canal protected
by three enormous sluicegates, and from that time the Rhine flows
directly to the sea. These sluices are the greatest monument in
Holland and, perhaps, the most admirable hydraulic work in Europe.

The dikes which protect the mouth of the canal, the walls, pillars,
and gates, present altogether the aspect of a Cyclopian fortress,
against which it seems that not only that sea, but the united forces
of all seas, must break as against a granite mountain. When the tide
rises the gates are closed to prevent the waters from invading the
land; when the tide recedes they are opened to give passage to the
waters of the Rhine which have accumulated behind them; and then a
mass of three thousand cubic feet of water passes through them in one
minute. On days when storms prevail, a concession is made to the sea,
and the most advanced of the sluicegates is left open; and then the
furious billows rush into the canal, like an enemy entering by a
breach, but they break upon the formidable barrier of the second gate,
behind which Holland stands and cries, "Thus far shalt thou go, and
no farther!" That enormous fortification which, on a desert shore,
defends a dying river and a fallen city from the ocean, has something
of solemnity which commands respect and admiration....

Napoleon said that it [Holland] was an alluvion of Trench rivers--the
Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Meuse--and with this pretext he added
it to the empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of transition
between land and sea. Another, as an immense crust of earth floating
on water. Others, an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe,
the end of the earth, and the beginning of the ocean