Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873

LIFE AT THE NATIONAL CAPITAL

There are few cities where life is so well put upon the stage as in Washington, so far as opportunity for satisfaction and enjoyment is considered. A certain grandeur characterizes all the approaches to the city. From the west you descend upon it by a way that leads out of cloudy mountain-chains and over chasms spanned by an awful trestle-work; from the south, passing our national Mecca, the Tomb of Washington, your highway is the picturesque Potomac, which here, nearly three hundred miles from the sea, broadly embays itself as if to mirror the magnificence of the place; from the north the track winds along the banks of the Delaware, white with its coastwise commerce, in and out among the beautiful bridges that arch the Schuylkill, across the broad Susquehanna, past blazing forges and foundries, and over the long and lonely expanses of the two Gunpowder Rivers—desert wastes of water, stretching for miles away without a sail, without a light, in the melancholy grandeur of a very dream of desolation. If it is at night that you step from the station, halfway down the distance you presently see the ray of a street-lamp throw up the façade of the Patent Office in broken light and shadow; you see before you and under the hill the twinkle of scattered groups of light; you see, far off, the long row of the Treasury columns half lost in darkness, and you will remember pictured scenes of bivouacs among the ruins of Baalbec. And if it is in the morning that you arrive, fresh from the turbulence of Broadway, from the quaint and tortuous hillside lanes of Boston, from the elegant monotony of Philadelphia, the impression made upon you is still not very different. Though you are in the heart of the place, it seems to lie before you like a city in the distance. Now the mist is stripped away from some massive marble pile; now a prospect opens of river and wood and the pillared heights of Arlington; now a lofty heaven reveals a waning moon, it may be—for every square has its horizon—the morning-star flames out, a red and yellow sunrise burns behind the silver cloud of the Capitol dome, and the whole city, in its splendor and its squalor, bared to view, gives you a suffocating sense of the pettiness of all other places before the opulence of sky, the width and height, the light and space and air, that Washington affords.

The concentric labyrinth of the city's plan is indeed something altogether unique; but whether it owes its origin to the fear of the old French barricade or to a desire for grandeur and scope, the effect attained is the same one of airy magnificence—monstrous avenues crossing the right angles of the streets in diagonals radiating from the White House and the Capitol, and all tiresomeness prevented by the accommodating way which these avenues have of turning out for any edifice that fancies their situation; while to keep upon them you are so perpetually crossing one street or losing your way down another that you may almost imagine yourself a spider walking across a web.

The designer of all this must have had a city in his mind's eye that rivaled Napoleon's Paris—buildings, monuments, marbles, fountains, trees, and everywhere great spaces and shining skies. For years, though, this visionary city has existed only among the castles of the air, and it is within a little while that the District government has begun to put in a substantial underpinning to the cloudy fabric. But although wretched thoroughfares and dilapidated dwellings, until the last decade, have characterized the place, the fine public buildings have for a long while awaited their fit surroundings—buildings mostly of the Grecian types, which, however unfit they might 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. There is hardly a street but down its vista some allurement is displayed: this one reaches far away, through the green of willows and the blue of distance, across the Long Bridge and into the hills of Virginia; that one ends in the Agricultural Department and its delightful grounds; down these the Institution is seen at various angles in various guises; while the great Pennsylvania Avenue gives you at one end the Capitol dome, always a thin and pale blue mist about its whiteness, with the shining colonnades that bear it lifted high over the tossing treetops below, and at the other end the southern façade of the Treasury, rising before you like an antique temple, while noble views open at every intersection of the cross-streets there; and toward nightfall the distant mists of the river-country beyond build up sunsets unrivaled in their gorgeousness.

There are few more interesting thoroughfares in the world than this avenue. Here ruler and ruled jostle each other; here thunder the liveried equipages of foreign nobles; here saunters the President, and nobody turns to look. Sooner or later all the famous of the world are tolerably sure to be met upon it: as we walk there History walks beside us and mighty shadows move before us. Washington has dashed down that avenue in his yellow chariot that was painted with cupids and drawn by six white horses; Hamilton, Jefferson, La Fayette, Burr, and all the gods of the republic have trodden it before us; dishonoring British squadrons have marched upon it; it has shaken to the tread of our own legions; and great forms begin to loom in the national memory that have just passed from its daily crowds. Nor does all its interest belong to the past: those daily crowds themselves are full of perpetual dramas in which the actors are unknown perhaps to fame or fiction, but none the less real and in sad earnest with their play. Here goes a little withered man in his threadbare coat: he has a proud and scowling face, but he pauses with a singularly sweet and gentle manner at every group of children, black or white. He is an old numismatician, a foreigner, and his youth in Europe was given to the gathering of coins and medals till he had a nearly unrivaled collection, and he came over the sea, hoping to dispose of them to the government of this country. Failing in his purpose, his means dwindling day by day, he was obliged to pledge a portion of his treasure that he might be able to live. It cut him to the heart to divide the collection: he had the history of the world in those incontrovertible records of brass and silver and gold, currency of the old Hindoo, of the Assyrian—medals where Alexander's superb profile shone crowned as Apollo—coins of the Ptolemies, of the Cæsars, of almost every people and generation from the beginning of civilization till to-day. But divide them he did, and left a part of them in other hands, and went to the North. There, driven by necessity, he pledged another portion; and after a while, wishing to redeem the latter pledge, and not being allowed to do so, he began a lawsuit to obtain it. The court decided the case against him; and the little man, half crazed, unable to obtain the portion he had pledged in Washington, and now seeing this also leave him, cried out in the open court, "O unjust judge! God shall demand your soul of you!" And the judge, with a sudden exclamation, fell backward, and before the sun set he was dead. The little numismatician returned to Washington, and having failed in all the hopes of his life, took translating and any other writing he could find to do. But there a certain high official having treated him unworthily, he adjured him much as he had adjured the unjust judge; and a fortnight afterward the official had gone to join the judge. It is hardly surprising if there were a vague feeling toward this really excellent man and scholar as toward one having the evil eye, whom people dread to meet and fear to offend.

But here is another individual with another experience. Gems are his passion, and for years he has sacrificed to it. He is only an old clerk on a moderate salary, but no misadventure has ever disturbed his plans, and year by year he has added some treasure to his hoard till it is unique as it is precious. There are rings of bishops and kings; jeweled baubles from Egyptian tombs and gold-wrought ornaments of the Montezumas; a cameo where a single face with its shadows makes six laughing and six weeping outlines; a cat's-eye quartz to which the one the king of Siam has is perhaps the mate; diamonds and pearls, amethysts and topazes, beryls and opals, single emeralds of rare beauty and doublets of great size, rubies of the real pigeon's blood, and sapphires whose heart is blue as the bluest midnight, but whose angles refract a radiance red as fire; chains of carved beads; seals, intaglios,—to almost all of them some legend attaching.

Here passes a person very different from either of these—a tall and martial figure, a filibustero in every clime, hunted with blood-hounds in the Spanish sierras when Don Carlos needed him, floating naked on bladders down the Danube, with despatches in his mouth, when the Hungarians were sore pressed. Here goes a jolly, happy man, who contentedly lets title and coronet go by across the sea while he practices law in the Patent Office. Here on the avenue go up and down all these people, and countless others with stories as pointed, whether it be such a story as that of Captain Suter, whose treacherous servant bartered all the gold of California for a single drink, or of this black man who to-day is free and yesterday was a slave.

But attractive as this picturesque grouping of avenues and edifices may be, the attraction does not belong to the outside alone: inside the great doors of the majestic halls you will find that time has wings while you pass in review the trophies of all the zones, and of the meteoric heavens too, preserved in the Smithsonian, or the archives of the country in the Patent Office. This latter is indeed a place of enchantment. The Pompeiian hall has something of the air of a hall dressed for legerdemain, and if you pause to think you will note a strange wizardry at work there. You linger before a little printing-press, and as if magical clouds rose and shut out the work-day world, the skies of Greece are overhead and the Ancient searching for his lever with which to move the world passes down the room and lingers with you; for surely he has found the lever, and surely the world has been moved with it, the boundaries of empires broken up, kings discrowned, republics ruined. Go farther: a case of toys: harmless trifles enough, arrests you—cannon a finger long, batteries the size of a lady's spool-stand, but the reduced models of death-dealing engines whose power of wholesale slaughter may one day revolutionize the codes of nations and abolish warfare. In another case you observe only a lump of coal, a phial of pitch, a flask of oil; and the necromancer of the place has dipped his rod down into the central darkness of the earth and drawn up light like the day's. Yet beyond: an iron stirrup and a slender spur, and the sewing-girl has but to set her foot there and escape the shapes that dog her. Not far away, again, we remember the Oriental magician, who as often as the king cut off his head grew another in its place, as we see the machinery for a feat almost as wonderful in the exact anatomy of steel springs and leather ligaments made to fit upon the very nerves of volition themselves, till the halt walk and the maimed are made whole. In this spot is the jar into which the fisherman shut the afrite; in that are the great genii who gather in a harvest; and in still another there lies a tiny thing answering your touch with no louder noise than a buzz and a click, but its whisper can be heard from end to end of the land, and it runs beneath the roar of ocean to carry the voice of one world to another. In fact, within these crystal cells the intelligence of all our millions is concreted; and it is no wonder that in the face of the marvels here inventors are sometimes seized with a temporary madness, and have to be cared for till the fit passes.