t be for a land
where damp dark heavens make all the spires that can spring up to
catch the sunshine a necessity, are perfectly appropriate to a climate
where the long hot summers demand the shelter of flat roofs and cool
protecting porticoes. There are, then, already, the Patent Office,
with its massive Doric simplicity; the Treasury, with the superb
extent of its columned sides; the Post Office, with its dazzling
Corinthian splendor; the Institution, with its romantic towers and
turrets of dark red stone, ivy-grown and in the midst of gardens; and
the Capitol, whose dome rises over the city, so pale, so perfect and
so buoyant that it seems only a cloud among the clouds--a pile that by
daylight looks like a white altar of liberty set on its hilltop among
velvet lawns and embowering trees, and which by starlight--when you
see the sentinel lamps throw out the great shadows of the arches at
its foundation, see the lofty flights of steps with their exquisite
gradation, see the long flying lines of the rows of columns, monoliths
of marble, taking a sparkle of light and retreating into distance and
darkness, and follow up the heights till your eye rests on the shadowy
dome hanging in the mid-heavens with the stars themselves--seems in
its vast white sublimity the shrine of nothing less than the Genius of
the nation. And by and by, when the building shall be quite complete,
and shrubbery shall have grown in the new grounds, when the almond and
the tulip tree and that burning bush the scarlet Japan quince, shall
have come to blossom there, and the giant magnolia shall lift its
snowy urns of incense about the spot, imagination will be able to
conjure up no image of majesty and beauty eclipsing the reality. For
all this and much more is now under way: streets have been leveled and
paved and parked, embankments have been terraced, boulevards have been
planted with mile-long rows of lindens, blossoming gardens have been
laid out, fountains have been opened, and such dwellings erected with
their grass-plots and their water-jets before them, in place of the
bare old barracks and shanties, that it is now a city of parks and
palaces. Your carriage can roll for leagues over streets whose roadway
is smooth as a floor, past squares rich in the foliage and flower
of their season, enchanting pictures of river and height unveiled at
every turn, and the squalor once so prominent is seen striking its
tents, while only the splendor remains. The