Delft is the most charming town in the world. It is one of the neat cities: trim, small, packed, self-contained. A good woman in early middle age, careful of her dress, united, orderly not without a sober beauty-such a woman on her way to church of a Sunday morning is not more pleasing than Delft. it is on the verge of monotony, yet still individual; in one style, yet still suggesting many centuries of activity. There is a full harmony of many colours, yet the memory the place leaves is of a united, warm, and generous tone. Were you suddenly put down in Delft, you would know very well that the vast and luxuriant meadows of Holland surrounded it, so much are its air, houses; and habits those of men inspired by the fields. Delft is very quiet, as befits a town so many of whose streets are ordered lanes of water, yet one is inspired all the while by the voices of children, and the place is strongly alive. Over its sky there follows in stately order the great white clouds of summer, and at evening the haze is lit just barely from below with the transforming level light that is the joy and inspiration with the Netherlands. Against much an exspanse stands up for ever one of the gigantic but delicate belfries, round which these towns are gathered. For Holland, it seems, is not a country of villages, but of compact, clean towns, standing scattered over a great waste of grass like the sea. This belfry of Delft is a thing by itself in Europe, and this truth can be said of it by a man who sees it for the first time: its enormous height is drawn up, as it were, and enhances by every chance stroke that the infinite flats love the contrast of such pinnacles, and they have made in the labour of about a thousand years a landscape of their own by building, just as they have by ceaseless labour made a rich pasture and home out of the solitary marshes of the delta.