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.