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Nothing can be more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side, with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle- work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will.

They might have been sisters, those many successive loves, or one and the same lady over and over again, in slightly varied humour and attire perhaps, at the different intervals of some rather lengthy, mimetic masque of love, to which the theatrical dress of that day was appropriate; for the mannered Italian, or Italianised, artists, including the much-prized, native Janet, with his favourite water- green backgrounds, aware of the poet's predilection, had given to all alike the same brown eyes and tender eyelids and golden hair and somewhat ambered paleness, varying only the curious artifices of the dress knots, and nets, and golden spider-work, and clear, flat stones.

Soon it grew dark, and we strode on up hill and down dale, at one time for a mile or more through burnt forest, with its ghastly spider-work of leafless decaying branches and creepers against the moonlit sky a sad sight: but music enough we had to cheer us on our way.

Nothing can be more exquisite in its way than the grande place in the very heart of the city, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied buildings bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar to the Netherlands, with the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side, with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet into the air and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needle- work, sugarwork, spider-work, or what you will.