The day upon which I first approached
this city would have given a charm even to desolation.
It was on the tenth of November; the air elastic,
but bland as on a fine June morning at home; the temperature
was about the same too, but attended with a clearness
of atmosphere in all quarters that seldom falls out
within our islands.
The passage down the Elk river is
quite beautiful: the shores on either hand are
bold and undulating; the country finely wooded; the
banks indented by numerous bays and inlets, whose
jutting capes so intersect each other that in several
reaches the voyager is, as it were, completely land-locked,
and might imagine himself coasting about some pretty
lake.
We neared the well-closed harbour
amidst a fleet of some hundred and fifty sail, of
all sizes and of every variety of rig, from the simple
two-sailed heavy sloop to that perfection of naval
architecture, the Clipper schooner of Baltimore, with
her long tapering masts raking over her taffrail,
and her symmetrical hull fairly leaping out of water,
as though she moved from wave to wave by a succession
of graceful bounds rather than held her course by
cleaving a pathway through them, as did her more cumbrous
fellows.
The eye was charmed and the heart
elevated by these unequivocal evidences of thriving
commerce sweeping towards the city; which rises gradually,
as it spreads over the face of the irregular hill it
occupies. Several domes of considerable magnitude,
a tall column or two, with various towers and spires,
rendered conspicuous from the nature of the site,
invest it with an air of much importance, and have
gained for it the title of the City of Monuments.
The main street, like that of Boston,
has very much the look of an English county-town;
and the air of the shops is wholly English. I
wandered about here guided by curiosity and caprice,the
only cicerone I ever desire,and saw most
things worthy note. I attended service at the
cathedral, where I heard mass admirably performed,
for in this choir are several voices of a very high
order.
The interior of the church is good;
the altar most worthily fitted up; and the general
effect would be imposing were it not marred by the
introduction of regular lines of exceedingly comfortable
but most uncatholic-looking pews, with the which,
I confess, I felt so vexed, that I could have found
in my heart, Heaven pardon me! to have wished them
fairly floating in the bay, only for the delicate creatures
who sat within them, on whose transparent brows and
soft dark eyes it was impossible to look and breathe
a wish or harbour a thought of evil.
I next mounted the Washington column,
as it is called, and beheld a sunset from its top
that would have well recompensed a poet or painter
for a journey over “the broa-a-d At-alantic,”
as poor Incledon used to emphasize it.
This is a noble column and splendidly
put together, of workmanship and material calculated
to endure,lasting, unimpeachable by time
or change, as is the fame of the patriot to whose
virtues it is well inscribed; but the statue itself
is bad, ineffective, and in no situation or distance
I could discover at all like the great original, whose
personal characteristics were nevertheless striking,
and well adapted for the artist.
The inverted bee-hive too, which is
overturned on the head of the capital, for the purpose,
as it were, of hoisting the figure a little higher,
is in bad taste, and detracts from the plainness of
the column, which, if divested of both bee-hive and
figure, would be an object worthy to commemorate the
citizen Washington, in whose character simplicity
gave lustre to the grandeur with which it was happily
blended; softening and chastening it, and making him,
even in the sternest times, more loved than feared.
I rode hard for a few hours to the
north and west of the city, accompanied by a Scotch
friend; in the course of which ride we dived down
some wooded glens, and crossed some rock-strewn brooks,
that called to his memory the brawling waters of his
own rugged land,so constantly, at all
times and in all places, is the wanderer’s mind
prepared to veer homeward.
I have sometimes smiled at the total
absence of similarity between the distant original
and the subject that has served to challenge comparison.
In this case, however, there was, in my mind, good
ground enough for the recollection: at one spot,
in particular, we broke from a thickly-wooded hill
side that we had for some time been blindly threading,
and found ourselves just over a clear pebbled stream,
skirted on the opposite bank by a fair fresh meadow,
itself bounded again by a wooded height yet more stony
and steep than that by which we sought to descend:
on our right, in an angle of the meadow, stood a farmhouse,
roughly built of grey-stone and lime, surrounded by
numerous offices; and, lower down the brook, a mill
of similar character.
After a long look upon this pretty
sequestered spot, we descended to the bed of the stream,
and found a railroad already skirting its course.
Passing the mill by a bridle-path,
we here saw the bed of our little brook, fallen far
beneath, tossing, raging, and whirling its way amongst
great masses, and tumbling over the rocky ledges dividing
smooth beds of close black gneiss. Yet a little
lower, we struck a road leading over a bridge, by
which we re-crossed the now important current; and
hence the upward view was as glen-like, gloomy, and
wild as Scottish imagination could desire.