I passed the next two months between this city and Philadelphia, taking leave of the audience of the latter city on Saturday, May the 9th, attended by demonstrations of the kindest and most flattering regard. The next week I idled between Princeton and New York. The Artists’ Exhibition was at this time open here, and it afforded me genuine pleasure to see many pictures that were good, and numbers of early attempts of a highly promising character.

I also visited an exhibition of pictures which had been proffered to Congress at the sum of forty thousand dollars, in order that this collection might form the foundation of a great national gallery; a worthy object, and of which these pictures would have formed a right-becoming commencement.

Here were specimens, and worthy ones, of many masters; amongst others a Murillo, indisputably genuine, and, although a little faded in colour, still worth a wilderness of most other productions. The subject was a painful one too, being the agony of Christ on the Mount of Olives.

Never, surely, was the utter prostration of flesh and soul so speakingly made out; bitter indeed must the cup have been so painfully contemplated by one so meek, so patient of suffering; Omniscience only, being so entreated, could yet have held it to the sufferer’s pallid lips, or contemplated with a fixed purpose the sorrowing eyes imploringly cast upwards.

Before the kneeling Christ, the worn and wasted man, there floated an angel worthy of the dying Psalmist’s imagining, so unearthly, so ethereal! What a full heart must the inspired painter have had as in his mind’s eye he purely shadowed forth this most perfect conception of one of those who hold companionship with God! It was made up of all the rarest traits of beauty, yet its loveliness was not of the world: the veriest dullard looking on it would have paused in admiration; the most brutal have gazed into those pure eyes, untainted by one earthly feeling, one sinful thought, or impure desire. On my mind the effect was thrilling: I have pictured to myself angels as poets have described them, and have often before looked upon them such as they have been conceived by Angelo, Correggio, and other master-spirits amongst men, and have seen faces of theirs on which I could have looked unsatiated again and again, and forms I could have loved with all my heart; but never beheld an emanation of the Spirit of God, a thing only to be gazed on holily and worshipped humbly, until I met with this angel of Murillo’s.

Were I Pope, the painter should be canonized as one visibly inspired from heaven, and on whose visions angels must have waited, since earth never could have supplied from its fairest a model for such expression as he has here given to the comforter of that heart-broken Christ. It is worth living virtuously, to die in the hope of such companionship hereafter, and for all eternity. After having been for two years deprived of the pleasure an enthusiast derives from the painter’s art, the mere contemplation of such a picture elevates and refines one’s spirit; the world and worldly feelings are forgot, and for a moment the soul breathes freely within its earthly prison.

Here were three pictures of Sir Joshua Reynolds; one a group of the Clive family, including the native Ayah holding a little girl on a chair. This Indian nurse is painted to the life, graceful, animated, and devoted; only for the difference of complexion, one might imagine the delicate girl she looks on with such tender pride her own, and not the offspring of the cold white woman whose eyes are fixed on you as she stands vis-a-vis to her stiff lord, who is dressed in a rappee-coloured habit richly overlaid with gold.

This picture might very well be described as a fancy subject, and designated Nature and Art. Opposite this fine picture of our English master hung another group, by Rembrandt; making up in force and colour what it lacked in delicacy and refinement. The subject was the De Witt family; and each portrait wore that genuine stamp of truth that left no question of their resemblance to the Dutch originals.

There were some sea-pieces by Backhuysen, and one by Vanderveldt; several excellent landscapes; a couple of gallery pictures worthy a place in the Pitti, together with Danby’s Opening of the Sixth Seal. All together, in fact, this was a collection of no mean pretensions, which would have been an exceedingly creditable foundation on which to have raised a national gallery. The sum which it was required Congress should appropriate to the purchase was forty thousand dollars; and considering how that assembly is constituted, how little most of its members know or care about pictures, or of their intrinsic value, and how utterly unimbued they are with any conception of the moral worth of art to a young nation, I conceive it very creditable to the body that the motion was negatived by only two votes.

How could a member from Illinois or Mississippi have justified such an item in the budget to his constituents? I can fancy a group of good Jackson men, after reading of an appropriation of forty thousand dollars for the purchase of twenty pictures, raising their admiring eyes to a portrait of the General swinging from the signpost, for the painting of which, with a horse’s head into the bargain, the tavern-keeper, Major Jones, had paid no cent more than fifteen dollars; and then coming back on the corrupt motives which could induce a vote of a couple of thousand a-piece for pictures “that could not by any natural means be liker nature, or more handsomely done, nohow, by any foreigner that ever fisted a paint-brush.”

The attempting Congress was, in truth, a mistake; but I cannot help thinking that, had a subscription been opened in either of the great Northern cities, or in New Orleans, for the purpose of founding a State collection, a much greater sum might have been readily raised; since there are in each of these cities numbers of wealthy individuals having the good taste to rightly appreciate the value of such an Institution, and public spirit enough to have effected the object, had it once received the impetus. As it is, I could not help regretting that the opportunity was lost, the pictures being advertised for sale without reserve, the auction to take place in a few days.

On the 19th we had a grand military ceremony and procession, to receive and escort to the Battery the remains of General Leavensworth, a brave and very popular officer, who died in consequence of the fatigue and privations incurred on the late prairie expedition amongst the tribes of the Missouri. His remains were brought hither by way of the Lakes on the route to the place of sepulture.

The volunteer corps were all turned out on this occasion, each remarkable for the neatness of its dress and completeness of appointment. The members of these corps also had a trim and dainty air well becoming men playing at soldiers, a game, by the way, no full-grown biped who regards his personal dignity ought ever to play after arriving at the years of discretion: for youths it is a cheerful and becoming amusement enough; but for fat, full-blown gentlemen! Nothing can be conceived more whimsical than the uncomfortable air of ease it is necessary to assume on the occasion; particularly for such as are promoted to the ticklish degree of field-officers; each of whom is most unconscionably expected at one and the same instant to retain possession of a hard-mouthed horse, a pair or two of reins, a sword, a plumed chapeau, and his seat into the bargain, having only the ordinary allowance of hands to help himself withal. It is all very amusing for the bystanders to laugh at the cruel scrape their friends are in when so be-deviled in a crowded street on a hot day; but let those who conceive the matter so easy, only get appointed to the dangerous eminence, and try how they like it.

Good-humour and cool temper are also indispensable requisites in a commander of volunteer cavalry here; for on this occasion I beheld two or three impatient carmen and restive jarveys very coolly charge upon the flank of the advance of cavalry whilst the troop was filing across the street out of the park, and persist in forcing the line, malgré the civil remonstrance of the combined staff, who nevertheless yielded with the best possible humour.

Now in England I have invariably noted that your chaw-bacon, when once he buckles harness on, and has “the blast of war blown in his ears,” becomes a very Tartar in his bearing, and is much less conciliating towards his fellow snobs than is your regular soldier, whose trade is war. With us, your yeomen whenever they have a chance, I have observed, most uncivilly poke about the lièges with but and bayonet, or thump and rump them with their chargers, and entice the ill-broken brutes with insidious prods of the spur to swish their tails, if tails they have, into the upturned phizes of their awe-stricken fellows.

Here, on the contrary, your volunteers “do their spiriting gently:” all is good-nature and good manners; and a front is diminished, or a column of companies in line of march is eased off to the right or left to make way for carts or coaches, as the case requires, with a promptness which is the more creditable from the fact that the execution of a change in movement is no light matter.

The persons who appeared least to enjoy the eclat of this military fête were the officers of the regular United States’ army. They were readily distinguished by their upright, soldier-like air, together with a certain cold, half-proud expression, as though they discovered no fun in the thing, and moreover were insensible to the honour of the companionship they were admitted to. Added to the above characteristics which struck me, I perceived that not one of these gentlemen had so much as unsheathed his sword, or seemed aware of having such an appendage by his side; whereas, of the gallant volunteers, there was not a man, from the surgeon to the colonel, but had his iron out brightly flashing back the sunbeams, although to some of the mounted officers this must have been a matter of additional inconvenience, not to say considerable peril.

During the course of the procession a salute was fired from the battery by the mounted artillery corps; the bands played, and the bells of the different churches on the line of march tolled for the dead.

On the whole, this little affair was very well conceived, and better managed, than it would have been by any other citizen troops, excepting, perhaps, the French, who appear to adopt the air and habit of soldiers more perfectly than any other bourgeoisie whatever.

On Friday, May 28th, I acted for the last time in the States, and so ended at the Park, where I began, and as I began, to a crowded audience. But the merry faces assembled here were no longer unknown to me; I was on my debut, a stranger amongst strangers: I now felt myself surrounded by personal friends, and by an audience which had frankly welcomed me; which had continued to cherish my efforts by increasing kindness and consideration, and which had now thronged here less perhaps to witness a performance so often repeated, than to take leave of an individual with whom the persons composing it had cultivated a close acquaintanceship, and for whose talent they had encouraged a preference.

I am not of those who look upon the bond linking audience and actor as a mercenary contract, for the hours during which the latter yields his quantum of strength and spirit to the former for so much coin, and there is an end. Were I, unhappily, possessed by such a morbid feeling, I could no longer act, the spell would be broken. It is true, I might constrain bone and sinew to administer to my necessities, and continue to barter these with the public for bread; but the inspiring spirit would be away, sunk past recall. Severed from the sympathies of those it wrought for, it would cease to lighten upon the scene, which the power of enlisting those sympathies alone redeems from contempt.

But it is not so, as every well-constituted mind will avouch. Preference, and a constant expression of favour from his auditory, necessarily beget a kind feeling in return: the actor is aware also that he is not always in a condition to fulfil his part of the bond; illness, low spirits, crosses, losses, or any of “the thousand ills that flesh is heir to,” rob the mind of its elasticity, and the body of its power; yet rarely does the disappointed auditor turn on the favourite and act the clamorous creditor.

Even in very extreme cases, what a spirit of forbearance have we seen exhibited, what positive sympathy have we felt extended in our own time to cherished players! It is at such moments that, more exposed, as he is, to immediate censure, and more helpless than any other of the servants of the public, he also feels himself more especially, more kindly considered, and, if possessed of a kindly heart, cannot fail to be touched by the feeling.

After illness or prolonged absence too, it is in the electric burst of welcome, the enthusiastically prolonged cheer of gratulation, and in the genuine pleasure sparkling from hundreds of uplifted ardent eyes, that the man who devotes himself to win the player’s meed receives his brief, his shadowy it may be, but his inspiring triumph, accompanied by the assurance that he is closely linked with the kindest feelings of those who for the scene are subject to his thrall.

And when at length the hour of farewell comes, it is in the anxious pause, the breathless attention, yet more impressive than all other species of homage, that “the poor player,” about to be “heard no more,” reads the assurance that on the many young fresh hearts now subject to his art he has indelibly engraven his name, often to be pleasantly recalled in after hours, perhaps of pain and worldly care.

It is in the hope of gaining this living record he seeks consolation for the absence of all other less perishable fame: expecting, hoping nothing from posterity, he has a stronger claim upon the kindness of his contemporaries, for whom alone he lives, and the feeling is reciprocal: hence it is that these repay him with a superabundance of present regard, to soften to him the consciousness of the oblivion to which his memory is inevitably consigned, however great his genius, and however ardent its longings “after immortality.”