sed visions of my youth. The romantic imagination
of a boy of fifteen is sometimes content to tread the ground, and
sometimes it climbs with eager audacity to a giddy height. It dreams
of supernatural beauty, of intoxicating perfumes, of consuming love,
and imagines that all these are comprised in the mysterious and
inaccessible creatures that fortune has placed at the summit of the
social scale. And among the thousand strange, foolish, and impossible
fancies that enter his mind he dreams of scaling towering walls in the
dark with youthful agility, of passing formidable gates and deep
ditches, of opening mysterious doors, threading interminable corridors
amidst people overcome with sleep, of stepping silently through
immense saloons, of ascending aerial staircases, mounting the stones
of a tower at the risk of his life, reaching an immense height over
the tall trees of moonlit gardens, and at last of arriving, fainting
and bleeding, beneath a balcony, and hearing a superhuman voice speak
in accents of deep pity, of answering with equal tenderness, of
bursting into tears and invoking God, of leaning his forehead on the
marble and covering with desperate kisses a foot flashing with gems,
of abandoning his face in the perfumed silks, and of feeling his
reason flee and life desert him in an embrace more than human.

In this palace, called the House-in-the-Wood, besides other remarkable
things, is an octagonal room, the walls of which from floor to ceiling
are covered with paintings by the most celebrated artists of the
school of Rubens, among which is a huge allegorical painting by
Jordaens which represents the apotheosis of Frederick Henry. There is
a room filled with valuable presents from the Emperor of Japan, the
Viceroy of Egypt, and the East India Company; and an elegant little
room decorated with designs in chiaroscuro, which even when closely
examined are taken for bas-reliefs. These are the work of Jacob de
Wit, a painter who at the beginning of the last century won great fame
in this art of delusion. The other rooms are small, and handsome
without display; they are full of the treasures of a refined taste, as
becomes the great and modest house of Orange.

The custom of allowing strangers to enter the palace the moment after
the queen came out seemed strange to me, but it did not surprise me
when I learned of other customs and other popular traits, and in a
word the character of the royal family of Holland.

In