Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke--smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peo...pled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Soup of the evening, beautiful soup! Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!... Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! Beau--ootiful Soo--oop! Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, Beautiful, beautiful soup!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been em...ployed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements ... might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Babylon," exclaimed Rolf, who had to look down again and again at this net of shimmering strings of beads, this skein of light, t...his endless flowerbed of electric blossoms ... this labyrinth of rectangular windows threaded by gleaming canals, which is repeated over and over again with no change,... half order as though on a chessboard, half confusion, as though the Milky Way had fallen down from the sky ... a mosaic of colored fragments, but mobile, yet at the same time lifeless and cold as glass, then again the Bengal lights of a stage witches' sabbath,... an orgy of discord, of harmony, an orgy of the everyday, technological and mercantile above all; you immediately think of the Arabian Nights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Suppose that an inhabitant of Venus or Mars were to contemplate us from the height of a mountain, and watch the little black speck...s that we form in space, as we come and go in the streets and squares of our towns. Would the mere sight of our movements, our buildings, machines, and canals, convey to him any precise idea of our morality, intellect, our manner of thinking and loving, and hoping--in a word, of our real and intimate self? All he could do, like ourselves when we gaze at the hive, would be to take note of some facts that seem very surprising; and from these facts to deduce conclusions probably no less erroneous, no less uncertain, than those we choose to form concerning the bee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the ca...nals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... Amsterdam, with the river Amstel helping to give a lively current to its canals, with its patchwork of water streets, its long... double rows of trees which seem endless, its palaces, its magnificent houses with machicolated roofs, and, above all, the quaint craft, the old Dutch galleons, with their shadowy sails, their fine brown color, their queer round outlines, their unending picturesqueness, is a paradise for the painter.... Even the family washing, which the boatman's wife hangs out, with an occasional red shirt, helps the picture. It is a dream of color and tender tones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »