Public opinion, which is notoriously unkind to the
misdoings of old men, has at last taken up the matter
of—

“Winter lingering in the lap of May.”

The “town” is “verdant.” The enchanting spring-hats
of the ladies are breezily exposed in the plate-glass
windows of the milliners. The airy, delicate,
daisy-mead patterns for ladies' wear in the transition
month make every shop-window like a landscape of
May in Arcady; the men-tailors “turn out for lining
to the sun” the light woofs of the “demme!” tribe
for the demi-season; the Croton pipers water the
streets; the small wooden signs hang on every leafless
tree in the park, warning you to “keep off the grass;”
people are beginning to discuss the resorts of the sultry
season; and, in fact, everything is here but the month
itself. The table is set, and the hour and the appetite
come, but the dinner is not served.

“Oh! ever thus from childhood's hour!” &c.

Apropos of Croton water—there has been a great
overturn lately of “mill-privileges” in some of the
cellars of New York. The authorities have ferreted
out, it is said, an incredible quantity of usurped water-power.
applied to almost every branch of mechanism,
and drawn very quietly from the main “race” down
Broadway. One scratches one's head and wonders
he never thought of it before, the adaptation seems
so simple; but as the Common Council will hear no
argument about “natural privileges” and “backwater,”
the interloping wheels will easily be stopped turning.

As I presume you are interested in the one portion
of New York made classic by a foreign pen, let me
jot you down a mem. or two from my first visit to
Dickens's Hole at the Five Points, made one evening
last week with a distinguished party under the charge
of the Boz officer.

I had had an idea that this celebrated spot was on
the eastern limit of the city, at the end of one of the
omnibus-routes, and was surprised to find that it was
not more than three minutes' walk from Broadway,
and in full view from one of the fashionable corners.
It lies, indeed, in a lap between Broadway and the
Bowery, in what was once a secluded valley of the
island of Manhattan, though to believe it ever to have
been green or clean, requires a powerful effort of imagination.
We turned into Anthony street at half-past
ten, passed “the Tombs,” and took the downward
road, as did Orpheus and Dickens before us. It
was a cold night, but women stood at every door with
bare heads and shoulders, most of them with something
to say, and, by their attitudes, showing a complete
insensibility to cold. In everything they said,
they contrived to bring in the word “shilling.” There
were very few men to be seen, and those whom we
met skulked past as if avoiding observation—possibly
ashamed to be there, possibly shrinking from any further
acquaintance with officer Stevens, though neither
of these feelings seemed to be shared by the females
of the community. A little turn to the left brought
us up against what looked to me a blind, tumble-down
board fence; but the officer pulled a latch and opened
a door, and a flight of steps was disclosed. He went
down first and threw open a door at the bottom, letting
up a blaze of light, and we followed into the
grand subterranean Almack's of the Five Points.
And really it looked very clean and cheerful. It was
a spacious room with a low ceiling, excessively whitewashed,
nicely sanded, and well lit, and the black proprietor
and his “ministering spirits” (literally fulfilling
their vocation behind a very tidy bar) were well-dressed
and well-mannered people, and received Mr. Stevens
and his friends with the politeness of grand
chamberlains. We were a little early for the fashionable
hour, the “ladies not having arrived from the
theatres;” and, proposing to look in again after making
the round of the other resorts, we crept up again to
the street.

Our next dive was into a cellar crowded with negroes,
eating, drinking, and dancing, one very well
made mulatto-girl playing the castinets, and imitating
Elssler in what she called the cracoveragain. In their
way, these people seemed cheerful, dirty, and comfortable.
We looked in afterward at several drinking-places,
thronged with creatures who looked over their
shoulders very significantly at the officer; found one
or two barrooms kept by women who had preserved
the one virtue of neatness (though in every clean
place the hostess seemed a terrible virago), and it was
then proposed that we should see some of the dormitories
of this Alsatia. And at this point must end
all the cheerfulness of my description. This is called
“murdering alley,” said our guide. We entered between
two high brick walls, with barely room to pass,
and by the police-lantern made our way up a broken
and filthy staircase, to the first floor of a large building.
Under its one roof the officer thought there usually
slept a thousand of these wretched outcasts. He
knocked at a door on the left. It was opened unwillingly
by a woman who held a dirty horse-blanket
over her breast, but at the sight of the police-lantern
she stepped back and let us pass in. The floor was
covered with human beings asleep in their rags; and
when called by the officer to look in at a low closet
beyond, we could hardly put our feet to the ground,
they lay so closely together, black and white, men,
women, and children. The doorless apartment beyond,
of the size of a kennel, was occupied by a woman
and her daughter, and the daughter's child, lying
together on the floor, and covered by rags and cloths
of no distinguishable color, the rubbish of bones and
dirt only displaced by their emaciated limbs. The
sight was too sickening to endure, but there was no
egress without following close to the lantern. Another
door was opened to the right. It disclosed a low
and gloomy apartment, perhaps eight feet square.
Six or seven black women lay together in a heap, all
sleeping except the one who opened the door. Something
stirred in a heap of rags, and one of the party
removing a dirty piece of carpet with his cane, discovered
a newborn child. It belonged to one of the
sleepers in the rags, and had had an hour's experience
of the tender mercies of this world! But these details
are disgusting, and have gone far enough when
they have shown those who have the common comforts
of life how inestimably, by comparison, they are
blessed! For one, I had never before any adequate
idea of poverty in cities. I did not dream that human
beings, within reach of human aid, could be
abandoned to the wretchedness which I there saw—
and I have not described the half of it, for the delicacy
of your readers would not bear it, even in description.
And all these horrors of want and abandonment
lie almost within sound of your voice, as

[figure description] Page 009.[end figure description]

you pass Broadway! The officers sometimes make a
descent, and carry off swarms to Blackwell's Island—
for all the inhabitants of the Five Points are supposed
to be criminal and vicious—but still thousands are
there, subjects for tears and pity, starving, like rats
and dogs, with the sensibilities of human beings!

As we returned we heard screams and fighting on
every side, and the officers of the watch were carrying
off a party to the lock-up-house. We descended
once more to the grand ballroom, and found the dance
going on very merrily. Several very handsome mulatto
women were in the crowd, and a few “young
men about town,” mixed up with the blacks; and altogether
it was a picture of “amalgamation,” such
as I had never before seen. I was very glad to get
out of the neighborhood, leaving behind me, I am
free to confess, all discontent with my earthly allotment.
One gentleman who was with us left behind
him something of more value, having been robbed at
Almack's of his keys, pencilcase, and a few dollars,
the contents of two or three pockets. I wind up my
“notes” with the hope that the true picture I have
drawn may touch some moving-spring of benevolence
in private societies, or in the Common Council, and
that something may be soon done to alleviate the horrors
of the Five Points.

I took a stroll or two while in Boston, and was
struck with the contrast of its physiognomy to that
of New York. There is a look of staid respectability
and thrift in everything that strikes the eye in Boston.
The drays, carts, omnibuses, and public vehicles,
are well horsed and appointed, and driven by respectable-looking
men. The people are all clad very
warmly and very inelegantly. The face of every pedestrian
in the street has a marked errand in it—gentlemen
holding their nerves to the screw till they
have achieved the object of being out of doors, and
ladies undergoing a “constitutional” to carry out a
system. There are no individuals in Boston—they
are all classes. It is a cohesive and gregarious town,
and half a dozen portraits would give you the entire
population. Every eye in Boston seems to move in
its socket with a check—a fear of meeting something
that may offend it—and all heads are carried in a posture
of worthy gravity, singularly contagious. It
struck me the very loaves in the bakers' windows had
a look of virtuous exaction, to be eaten gravely, if at
all.

New York seems to me to differ from all this, as a
dish of rice, boiled to let every grain fall apart, differs
from a pot of mush. Every man you meet with in
our city walks with his countenance free of any sense
of observation or any dread of his neighbor. He has
evidently dressed to please himself, and he looks about
with an eye wholly at ease. He is an integer in the
throng, untroubled with any influence beyond the
risks of personal accident. There is neither restraint
nor curiosity in his look, and he neither expects to be
noticed by the passers-by, nor to see anything worthy
of more than half a glance in the persons he meets.
The moving sights of the city have all the same integral
and stand-alone character. The drays, instead
of belonging to a company, are each the property of
the man who drives it; the hacks and cabs are under
no corporate discipline, every ragged whip doing as
he likes with his own vehicle; and all the smaller
trades seem followed by individual impulse, responsible
to nothing but police-law. Boston has the advantage
in many things, but a man who has any taste
for cosmopolitism would very much prefer New York.

Wednesday was a long warm summer's day, with
no treachery in it to the close; and the rivulet of
Croton, which ripples round the sidewalk of the park,
and goes down the great throat of the drain, seemed
giving the dry city to drink. The pavement of
Broadway burst into flower. Birds were hung out at
the windows; hyacinths were put out to breathe;
and open casements and doors, lounging footsteps and
cheerful voices in the street, all gave sweet token of
summer. Thursday was a fine day, too, with a little
soupcon of east wind in its blandishments, and the
evening set in with a gentle summer rain, welcome as
most things are after their opposites, for the dust was
a nuisance; and to-day, Friday, it rains mildly and
steadily.

March made an expiring effort to give us a springday
yesterday. The morning dawned mild and bright,
and there was a voluptuous contralto in the cries of
the milkmen and the sweeps, which satisfied me, before
I was out of bed, that there was an arrival of a
south wind. The Chinese proverb says, “when thou
hast a day to be idle, be idle for a day;” but for that
very elusive “time when,” I irresistibly substitute the
day the wind sweetens after a sour northeaster. Oh,
the luxury (or curse, as the case may be!) of breakfasting
leisurely with an idle day before one!

I strolled up Broadway between nine and ten, and
encountered the morning tide down; and if you never
have studied the physiognomy of this great thoroughfare
in its various fluxes and refluxes, the differences
would amuse you. The clerks and workies have
passed down an hour before the nine o'clock tide, and
the sidewalk is filled at this time with bankers, brokers,
and speculators, bound to Wall street; old merchants
and junior partners, bound to Pearl and Water; and
lawyers, young and old, bound for Nassau and Pine.
Ah, the faces of care! The day's operations are
working out in their eyes; their hats are pitched forward
at the angle of a stagecoach with all the load on
the driver's seat, their shoulders are raised with the
shrug of anxiety, their steps are hurried and short,
and mortal face and gait could scarcely express a
heavier burden of solicitude than every man seems to
bear. They nod to you without a smile, and with a
kind of unconscious recognition; and, if you are unaccustomed
to walk out at that hour, you might fancy
that, if there were not some great public calamity,
your friends, at least, had done smiling on you.
Walk as far as Niblo's, stop at the greenhouse there,
and breathe an hour in the delicious atmosphere of
flowering plants, and then return. There is no longer
any particular current in Broadway. Foreigners coming
out from the cafès, after their late breakfast, and
idling up and down, for fresh air; country-people
shopping early; ladies going to their dress-makers in
close veils and demi-toilets; errand-boys, news-boys,
duns, and doctors, make up the throng. Toward
twelve o'clock there is a sprinkling of mechanics going
to dinner—a merry, short-jacketed, independentlooking
troop, glancing gayly at the women as they
pass, and disappearing around corners and up alleys,
and an hour later Broadway begins to brighten. The
omnibuses go along empty, and at a slow pace, for
people would rather walk than ride. The side-streets
are tributaries of silks and velvets, flowers and feathers,
to the great thoroughfare; and ladies, whose
proper mates (judging by the dress alone) should be
lords and princes, and dandies, shoppers, and loungers
of every description, take crowded possession of the
pavé. At nine o'clock you look into the troubled
faces of men going to their business, and ask yourself
“to what end is all this burden of care?” and at
two, you gaze on the universal prodigality of exterior,
and wonder what fills the multitude of pockets that
pay for it! The faces are beautiful, the shops are
thronged, the sidewalks crowded for an hour, and

[figure description] Page 010.[end figure description]

then the full tide turns, and sets upward. The most
of those who are out at three are bound to the upper
part of the city to dine; and the merchants and lawyers,
excited by collision and contest above the depression
of care, join, smiling, in the throng. The
physiognomy of the crowd is at its brightest. Dinner
is the smile of the day to most people, and the
hour approaches. Whatever has happened in stocks
or politics, whoever is dead, whoever ruined since
morning, Broadway is thronged with cheerful faces
and good appetites at three! The world will probably
dine with pleasure up to the last day—perhaps
breakfast with worldly care for the future on dooms-day
morning! And here I must break off my Daguerreotype
of yesterday's idling, for the wind came
round easterly and raw at three o'clock, and I was
driven in-doors to try industry as an opiate.

The first day of freedom from medical embargo is
equivalent, in most men's memories, to a new first impression
of existence. Dame Nature, like a provident
housewife, seems to take the opportunity of a sick
man's absence to whitewash and freshen the world he
occupies. Certainly, I never saw the bay of New
York look so beautiful as on Sunday noon; and you
may attribute as much as you please of this impression
to the “Claude Lorraine spectacles” of convalescence,
and as much more as pleases you to the
fact that it was an intoxicating and dissolving day of
spring.

The Battery on Sunday is the Champs-Elysées of
foreigners. I heard nothing spoken around me but
French and German. Wrapped in my cloak and
seated on a bench, I watched the children and the
poodle-dogs at their gambols, and it seemed to me as
if I were in some public resort over the water. They
bring such happiness to a day of idleness—these foreigners—
laughing, talking nonsense, totally unconscious
of observation, and delighted as much with the
passing of a rowboat, or a steamer, as an American
with the arrival of his own “argosy” from sea. They
are not the better class of foreigners who frequent the
Battery on Sunday. They are the newly-arrived, the
artisans, the German toymakers and the French bootmakers—
people who still wear the spacious-hipped
trousers and scant coats, the gold rings in the ears,
and the ruffled shirts of the lands of undandyfied
poverty. They are there by hundreds. They hang
over the railing and look off upon the sea. They sit
and smoke on the long benches. They run hither
and thither with their children, and behave as they
would in their own garden, using and enjoying it just
as if it were their own. And an enviable power they
have of it!

There had been a heavy fog on the water all the
morning, and quite a fleet of the river-craft had drifted
with the tide close on to the Battery. The soft
south wind was lifting the mist in undulating sweeps,
and covering and disclosing the spars and sails with a
phantom effect quite melo-dramatic. By two o'clock
the breeze was steady and the bay clear, and the horizon
was completely concealed with the spread to canvass.
The grass in the Battery plots seemed to be
growing visibly meantime, and to this animated seapicture
gave a foreground of tender and sparkling
green; the trees look feathery with the opening buds;
the children rolled on the grass and the summer
seemed come. Much as Nature loves the country,
she opens her green lap first in the cities. The valleys
are asleep under the snow, and will be for weeks.

I think I may safely announce to you the opening of
a new channel for literature. Mr. Stetson, mine host
of the Astor, as you are aware, is a man of genius, whose
advent, like Napoleon's, was the answer to a demand
in the national character. The peculiarly American
passion for life in hotels, and the mammoth size to which
these luxurious caravansaries have grown, demanded
some mind capable of systematizing and generalizing,
and of bringing these Napoleonic qualities to bear upon
the confused details of comfort and comestibles. I
need not enlarge upon the well-known military discipline
of the Johns and Thomases at the Astor, as most
of your readers have witnessed their matutinal drill,
and seen the simultaneous apparition of the smoking
joints, when the hundred and ten covers have been
whisked off by the word of command, like the heads
of so many Paynim knights decapitated in their helmets.
It has been reserved for this epoch to take and
digest beef and pudding by platoon, in martinet obedience
to a controlling spirit in white apron and carving-knife;
but, as I said before, it was the exigency
of the era, and the historian who records the national
trait will emblazon the name of Stetson as its interpreter
and moulding genius. I am wandering a little
from my design, however, which was simply to make
an admiring comment on the tact and adaptation of
Mr. Stetson, and to show how such minds open the
doors to important changes and innovations. Mr.
Stetson's observing eye had long since detected, that,
if there was any point in which his table d'hote suffered
by comparison with private and princely banquets,
it was in the poverty of conversation and the
absence of general hilarity. This, of course, was owing
partly to the temperance reform, but more particularly
to the want of topics common to the guests,
the persons meeting there being but slightly acquainted.
Music would have furnished a good diapason for
harmonizing the animal spirits of the company, but
this was too expensive; and the first tentative to the
present experiment was the introduction of a very facetious
wine list on the back of the carte. When
people no longer smiled at “Wedding Wine,” “Wanton
Madeira, exceedingly delicate,” &c., the French
carte was suddenly turned into English (explaining
many a sphinx riddle to faithful believers in the cook),
and a postscript was added, containing a list of the times
of arrival and departure of the mails, and information
relative to steamboats and railroads. And with the
spring, I understand, this is to be extended into a
“Daily Prandial Gazette,” and a copy to be furnished
to each guest with the soup, containing the arrivals
of the day at the hotel, the range of the thermometer,
the prospect of rain, “burstings-up” in Wall street,
and general advice as to the use of the castors—the
whole adapted to the meridian of a table d'hote, and
the ascertained demand of subjects for conversation.

In this improvement your prophetic eye will see,
probably, a new field for the ambition of authors (the
addition of one poem per diem, for example, coming
quite within the capacity of such a gazette), and, if I
might venture to saddle Mr. Stetson with advice, I
should recommend that it be confined as long as possible
to the debuts of young poets, the genial criticism
with which they would be read at such time and place
being an “aching void” in their present destiny.

The City Hotel re-opens to-morrow under the care
of the omni-recognisant Willard and his partner of
the olden time. The building has been entirely refreshed,
refitted, and refurnished, and I am told that
in comfort and luxury it far exceeds any hotel in this
country. The advances in the commodiousness and
elegance of these public houses, their economy compared
with housekeeping, and the difficulty of obtaining
tolerable servants, combine to make an inroad
upon the Lares and Penates of the metropolis, which

[figure description] Page 011.[end figure description]

may have an influence upon national character at
least worth the noting. Hundreds of persons who, up
to these disastrous times, have nursed their domestic
virtues in the privacy of their own firesides, are now
living at these gregarious palaces, passing their evenings
in such society as chance brings together, and
subjecting their children to such influences of body
and mind as belong more properly to a community of
Owen. Other more obvious objections aside, these
collections of families are not the most harmonious
communities in the world, and the histories of the
conflicting dignities and jostling interests of these
huddled masses will yet furnish most amusing material
to some future Pickwickian writer. The ladies
of the Carlton have lately sent in a remonstrance
against the admission of errandless bachelors into their
privileged drawing-room, and the brawls of the Guelphs
and Ghibellines are but a faint type of the contentions
in the ladies' wing of the Astor for places at
table, &c., &c. I should like to have the opinion of
some such generalizing mind as Dr. Channing's or
Mr. Adams's as to whether the peculiar gregariousness
of Americans is a crudity of national character
which will refine away, or is only a kind of bolder
crystallization characteristic of the freer nuclei of our
institutions. Channing long ago fastened the reproach
upon us of having weaker domestic ties than
the nations of Europe, though he did not see in it a
possible adaptation of Providence to the wants of a
wide country waiting for emigrants from families
easily dismembered; and it would not require much
ingenuity, perhaps, to find a special Providence in the
fact commented on above. But this is getting to be
a sermon.

Since commencing this letter, I have taken a stroll
up Broadway, and looked in at the City hotel. Willard
was in his place behind the bar, a little fatter than of
old, and somewhat gray with cabbage-growing, but his
wonderful memory of names and faces seemed in full
vigor; and, what with the tone of voice, the dexterity
of furnishing drinks, the off-hand welcome to every
comer-in, and the mechanical answering of questions
and calling to servants, he seemed to have begun precisely
where he left off, and his little episode of farming
must seem to him scarcely better than a dream.
A servant showed us over the house. A new gentlemen's
dining-room, lighted from the roof, has been
built in the area behind, and the old dining-room is
cut up into a reading-room and private parlors. The
famous assembly-room in the second story is also divided
up into parlors and ladies' dining-room; but the
garnishing and furnishing of the public and private
parlors are quite beyond anything I know of short of
the houses of nobility and royal palaces. The carpets
are of the finest Wilton and Brussels; the paper
upon the walls of the latest Parisian pattern; a new
piano in every parlor; and the beds and their belongings
of the most enticing freshness and comfortability.
The proprietors have not seen fit, however, to adopt
the fashion of “prices to suit the times,” but have
begun, plump and bold, at two dollars a day, and a
shilling a drink. Until the fine edge of all this novelty
wears off, they may reap a harvest which will repay
them for their outlay in paint and garnish. One
remark might be dropped into Willard's ear to some
advantage—that while he has been resting on his oars
at Dorchester, the people “on the town” have become
over-epicurean in their exactions of luxuries at hotels,
and it will take some “sharp practice” to beat the
“United States” at Philadelphia, and the Astor here.
People, at first, who have been accustomed to live at
the latter place, will find a certain relief at not being
helped to fish and pudding by fire of platoon, but in
the long run the systematic service of the Astor
achieves comfort. The Atlantic hotel, opposite the
Bowling Green, is also in progress of rifacimento; and
its old landlord, Anderson, who made a fortune in it
once, and kept one of the best houses in the country,
opens with it again on the 1st of May.

I am happy to announce to you that the leaves of
the trees in Trinity churchyard have fairly come to
light. The foliage in this enclosure is always a week
in advance of all others in the city, possibly from cadaverous
stimulus (“to such base uses may we come
at last”), and perhaps accelerated particularly, this
year, by the heat of the steam-engine, which, with
remorseless travestie, perpetually saws stone for the
new building over the “requiescat in pace!” I read
the names on desecrated tombstones every day in passing,
and associate them in my mind with the people aggrieved
(of whom one always has a list, longer or shorter).
Poor ghosts! as if there was no other place for a
steam-engine and a stonecutter's saw than a-top of the
sod which (if hymn and prayer go for anything) is expected
to “lie lightly on the dead man's breast!”
There is many a once wealthy aristocrat, powdered
over with the pumice of that abominable saw, who, if
he could rise and step down into Wall street, would
make sharp reckoning with heirs and executors for
suffering his small remainder of this world's room and
remembrance to be so robbed of its poetry and respect!
Meantime, this exquisitely-conceived piece
of architecture (Trinity church) is rising with admirable
effect, and, when completed, it will doubtless be
the first Gothic structure in America.

We had rather a novel turn-out of a four-in-hand
yesterday in Broadway—a vehicle drawn by four elephants.
There was some grandeur in the spectacle,
and some drollery. These enormous specimens of
the animal, most like us in intellect and least like us
in frame, are part of a menagerie; and they drew, in
the wagon to which they were attached, a band of music
belonging to the concern. They were, all four,
en chemise—covered with white cotton cloths to the
knees—but. Elssler-like, making great display of their
legs and ivory. The ropes were fastened to their
tusks, and they were urged by simple pounding on
the rear—which was very like flogging the side of a
hill, for they were up to the second stories of the
houses. To walk round one of these animals in a
tight fit of a booth is a very different thing from seeing
him paraded under the suitable ceiling of the sky.
I had no idea they could go over the ground so swimmingly.
They glided along with the ease of scows
going down with the tide, and with their trunks playing
about close to the pavement, seemed to be walking
Broadway like some other loafers—looking for
something green!

The Battery, or, as it has been called in England,
the “Marine Parade,” is never lovelier than in the
early freshness of the morning. The air is yet unimpaired
by the myriad fires of the city—the dew is untrodden,
and the velvet sheensparkles in the sunshine—
the walks are all neatly swept; and, treading pleasantly
upon the elastic earth, invigorated by the fresh
breeze from the sea, we cast our eyes over a scene of
beauty and enchantment unsurpassed in the world.
The correspondent of the Intelligencer says; I have
been out on the Battery this morning enjoying life,
and everything I saw was in the same humor—trees,
children, ladies, and ships-of-war. The very portholes
of the Warspite seemed pleased to have their
eyelids up. The Battery is a good deal thronged
before breakfast, and really I do not remember a promenade
in Europe which contains so much that is
beautiful. Just now we have three men-of-war lying

[figure description] Page 012.[end figure description]

on the stream—the majestic North Carolina and the
Independence having come round to their summer
moorings. Jersey shore looks fringed with willows,
and the islands and Brooklyn heights are bright and
verdant. The Croton river is bubbling up in a superb
fountain in Castle Garden. The craft in the bay
always seem doing a melo-drama—they cross and
mingle so picturesquely; and the trees are always
there; and the grass grows better for the children's
playing on it. Many thanks to fashion for having
taken the rich up-town and left their palaces and the
Battery to those who “board.”

I have spent an afternoon, since I wrote to you, in
the “animal kingdom” of Herr Driesbach. Four elephants
together were rather an uncommon sight, to
say nothing of the melo-drama performed by the liontamer.
There was another accidental feature of interest,
too—the presence of one or two hundred deaf
and dumb children, whose gestures and looks of astonishment
quite divided my curiosity with the show.
Spite of the repulsiveness of the thought, it was
impossible not to reflect how much of the difference
between us and some of the brute animals lies merely
in the gift of speech, and how nearly some human
beings, by losing this gift, would be brought to their
level. I was struck with the predominating animal-
look in the faces of the boys of the school, though
there were some female children with countenances of
a very delicate and intellectual cast.

I was an hour too early for the “performances,”
and I climbed into the big saddle worn by “Siam,”
and made a leisurely study of the four elephants and
their keepers and visiters. I had not noticed before
that the eyes of these huge animals were so small.
Those of “Hannibal,” the nearest elephant to me, resembled
the eyes of Sir Walter Scott; and I thought,
too, that the forehead was not unlike Sir Walter's.
And, as if this was not resemblance enough, there was
a copious issue from a bump between his forehead and
his ear! (What might we not expect if elephants
had “eaten paper and drunk ink?”) The resemblance
ceased with the legs, it is but respectful to Sir Walter
to say; for Hannibal is a dandy, and wears the fashionable
gaiter-trowser, with a difference—the gaiter
fitted neatly to every toe! The warlike name of this
elephant should be given to Siam, for the latter is the
great warrior of the party, and in a fight of six hours
with “Napoleon,” some three months since, broke off
both his tusks. He looks like a most determined
bruise. “Virginius” (the showman told me) killed
his keeper, and made an escapade into the marshes of
Carolina, not long ago; and, after an absence of six
weeks, was subdued and brought back by a former
keeper, of whose discipline he had a terrific recollection.
There are certainly different degrees of amiability
in their countenances. I looked in vain for
some of the wrinkles of age, in the one they said was
much the oldest. Unlike us, their skins grow smoother
with time—the enviable rascals! I noticed, by-the-way,
that though the proboscis of each of the others
was as smooth as dressed leather, that of Siam resembled,
in texture, a scrubbing-brush, or the third day of
a stiff beard. Why he should travel with a “hairtrunk,”
and the others not, I could not get out of the
showman. The expense of training and importing
these animals is enormous, and they are considered
worth a great deal of money. The four together consume
about two hundred weight of hay and six bushels
of oats per diem. Fortunately they do their own
land transportation, and carry their own trunks.

At four o'clock Siam knelt down, and four or five
men lifted his omnibus of a saddle upon his back.
The band then struck up a march, and he made the
circuit of the immense tent; but the effect of an elephant
in motion, with only his legs and trunk visible
(his body quite covered with the trappings), was
singularly droll. It looked like an avenue taking a
walk, preceded by a huge caterpillar. I could not
resist laughing heartily. After one round, Siam
stopped, and knelt again to receive passengers. The
wooden steps were laid against his eyebrow, and
thence the children stepped to the top of his head,
though here and there a scrambler shortened the step
by putting his foot into the ear of the patient animal.
The saddle was at last loaded with twelve girls; and
with this “fearful responsibility” on his back, the elephant
rose and made his rounds, kneeling and renewing
his load of “innocence” at every circuit.

The lion-tamer presently appeared, and astonished
the crowd rather more than the elephant. A prologue
was pronounced, setting forth that a slave was to be
delivered up to wild beasts, etc., etc. A green cloth
was spread before the cages in the open tent (“parlous
work,” I thought, among such tender meat as two
hundred children), and out sprung suddenly a full-grown
tiger, who seized the gentleman in flesh-colored
tights by the throat. A struggle ensues, in which
they roll over and over on the ground, and finally, the
victim gets the upper hand, and drags out his devourer
by the nape of his neck. I was inclined to think once
or twice that the tiger was doing more than was set
down for him in the play; but as the Newfoundland
dog of the establishment looked on very quietly, I
reserved my criticism.

The Herr next appeared in the long cage with all
his animals—lions, tigers, leopards, etc. He pulled
them about, put his hands in their mouths, and took
as many liberties with his stock of peltry as if it was
already made into muffs and tippets. They growled
and showed their teeth, but came when they were
called, and did as they were bid, very much to my
astonishment. He made a bed of them, among other
things—putting the tiger across the lion for a pillow,
stretching himself on the lion and another tiger, and
then pulling the leopard over his breast for a “comforter!”
He then sat down, and played nursery. The
tiger was as much as he could lift, but he seated him
upright on his knees, dandled and caressed him, and
finally rocked him apparently asleep in his arms! He
closed with an imitation of Fanny Elssler's pirouette,
with a tiger standing on his back. I was very glad, for
one, when I saw him go out and shut the door.

A man then brought out a young anaconda, and
twisted him round his neck (a devil of a boa it looked),
and, after enveloping himself completely in other
snakes, took them off again like cravats, and vanished.
And so ended the show. Herr Driesbach stood at the
door to bow us out, and a fine, handsome, determinedlooking
fellow he is.

Pardon us, ladies—those riding-hats let the sun
look in upon your alabaster foreheads—ay, and even
cross the bridge of your delicate noses! Take advice!
Wear your hats with a pitch forward rather,
like the dames in Charles the Second's time. You
look very charmingly on Roulstone's well-broken and
well-trained horses, but take not your pleasure at the
expense of the bright complexions which we admire.
“Sun-burnt,” in old English, was an epithet of contumely,
and


“The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unveil her beauty to the moon,”
let alone the sun.

We have been paid for letting the world know a
great many things that were of no consequence to the
world whatever—and, among other nothings, a certain
metropoliphobia of our own, on which we have expended
a great deal of choice grammar and punctuation.
We trust the world believes, by this, that, capable
as we are of loving our entire species (one at a

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time), we hate a city collectively. Having a little
moan to make, with a little moral at the close, we put
this private prejudice once more into type, trusting to
your indulgence, good reader.

This is June—and “where are you going this summer?”
though a pertinent question enough, and seasonable,
and just what anybody says to everybody he
meets, has to our ear a little offence in it. If it were
asked for information—a la bonne heure!—we are
willing to tell any friend where we are going—this side
the Styx. But though the question (asked with
most affectionate earnestness by your friend) is merely
a preface to enlightening you as to his own “watering-place,”
there must still be an answer! And suppose
that answer, though not a whit attended to, touches
upon your secret sorrow—your deucedest bore! Suppose—
but you see our drift! You understand, that
we are to sweat out the summer solstice within the
“bills of mortality!” You see that we are to comfort
our bucolic nostrils as we best may, with municipal
grass—picking here and there a clover-top or an aggravating
dandelion 'twixt postoffice and city-hall.
Heaven help us!

True, New York is “open at the top.” We are
prepared to be thankful for what comes down to us—
air, light, and dew. But alas! Earth is our mother!—
Earth, who sends all her blessings upward—Earth,
who, in the city, is stoned over and hammered down,
paved, flagged, suffocated—her natural breath quite
cut off, or driven to escape by drain and gas-pipe—her
flowers and herbs prevented—her springs shut down
from gushing! This arid pavement, this hot smell of
dust, this brick-color and paint—what are they to the
fragrant lap of our overlaid mother, with her drapery
of bright colors and tender green? Answer, oh
omnibus-horse! Answer, oh worky-editor!

But there be alleviations! It is to these that hangs
“the moral of our tale.” We presume most men
think themselves more worthy than “sparrows” of the
attention of Providence, and of course most men believe
in a special Providence for themselves. We do.
We believe that we shall not “fall to the ground without”
(a) “notice.” (But this, let us hope, is anticipating.)
We wish to speak now of the succedaneum
thrown in our path for our pastoral deprivations—for
the lost brook whose babbling current turned the
wheel of our idleness. Sweet brook, that never
robbed the pebbles of a ray of light in running over
them! It became a type to us—that brook. Our
thoughts ran brook-wise. Bright water, braiding its
ripples as its ran, became our vehicle of fancy. We
lagged, we dragged, we were “gravelled for lack of
matter” without it. And now mark!—Providence has
supplied it—(through his honor the mayor). A
brook—a clear brook—not pellucid, merely, but transparent—
a brook with a song tripping as musically
(when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook
now sequestered to the Philistines—trips daily before
us! Our daily walk is along its border—for (say) a
rod and a half. Meet us there if you will, oh congenial
spirit! As we go to the postoffice, we span its
fair current at the broadest, and take a fillip in our
fancy for the day. Would you know its geography
more definitely? Stand on the steps of the Astor,
and gaze over to the sign of “P. Pussedu, wig-maker,
from Italy.” Drop then the divining-rod to the left,
and a much frequented pump will become apparent,
perched over a projecting curb-stone, around which
the dancing and bright water trips with sparkling feet,
and a murmur audible at least to itself. It is the
outlet of the fountain in the Park, and, as Wordsworth
says,


“Parching summer hath no warrant
To consume this crystal well,”
as an order is first necessary from the corporation.
Oh! (if it were not for being taken to the watch-house)
we could sit by this brook in the moonlight,
and pour forth our melancholy moan! But the cabmen
wash their wheels in it now, and the echo would
be, “Want a cab, sir?” Metropolises, avaunt!

Lady Sale's Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan
impresses us somewhat with the idea that her ladyship
was a Tartar; and she was, perhaps, as “well bestowed”
in the army as anywhere else, in a world so generally
peaceful. It is a roughly-written book, too, in
point of style. Indeed she avows: “I do not attempt
to shine in rounded periods, but give everything that
occurs as it comes to my knowledge.” It appears,
however, that some injustice to officers, committed, as
she acknowledges, “in the heat of temper,” have
awakened a little censure in England, and have been
apologized for by her ladyship. This allowed, there
is much to admire—her manly modesty, among other
things. Toward the close of her journal, she remarks:
“Nothing can exceed the folly I have seen in
the papers regarding my wonderful self—how I headed
the troops, &c. Certainly I have headed the troops,
for the chiefs told me to come on with them for safety
sake; and thus I certainly did go far in advance of the
column; but it was no proof of valor, though one of
prudence.” We can readily believe that the qualities
which gained her ladyship such general admiration,
were not of a showy order. As a “soldier's wife,”
the title she gives herself, she esteemed it her duty to
take her part in danger, hardship, and captivity, without
complaint—to oppose a brave resistance to the foe
when others thought only of base submission, and to
set an example of invincible fortitude to the host of
meaner spirits in the camp. In the extremity of peril
and suffering she never murmurs, except when the
weakness of the commanders wrings from her some
expression of disgust and contempt. Of all the persons
attached to the army, she had the most real cause
of alarm, yet manifested the least. Unlike the other
ladies, she was separated from her husband, and heard
continually of his battles, his exposure, his wounds.
Her son-in-law dies in her arms, and she is left with
her widowed daughter in the hands of a band of merciless
savages, without one male relative to support
her. She is harassed by continual marches in the
depth of winter among mountain passes, where the
path is so thickly strewn with the mangled corpses of
her countrymen, that the hoofs of her horse tread
them into the earth; yet these multiplied ills fail to
quell her spirits or conquer her presence of mind. A
bullet pierces her arm; but when the ball is extracted,
she treats the wound as a scratch. This kind of fortitude
is the only courage which appears estimable or
becoming in a woman, and shines with as much lustre
in the conduct of Lady Sale throughout those trying
transactions, as in any character of which history
makes mention. It is scarcely necessary to add, that
few books published of late years have such strong
claims upon the attention of the public as the present.
The author evidently does not desire display; but her
courage and magnanimity will secure, in the annals of
heroic women, a foremost place for the name of Florentine
Sale.

Porcelain and crockery, champagne and cider, sunshine
and candlelight, silver cup and tin dipper, are
not of more different quality to our apprehension, than
people beautiful and people plain. We do not believe
they are to have the same destiny. We believe
that the plain and the beautiful are to be reproduced
in their own likeness in another world, and that
beauty must be paramount alike among men and

[figure description] Page 014.[end figure description]

angels. We believe everything should be given to
beauty that beauty wants—everything forgiven if
beauty err. We have no limit to our service of
beauty—no imaginable bound to our devotion. We
are secondary—subject—born thrall to beauty. And
in this faith we shall die.

But beauty in America is a very differently prized
commodity from beauty in England. Let us keep
clear of making an essay of this, and show what we
mean by parallel examples. Take two beautiful girls,
of the same comparative station—Miss Smith, of London,
daughter of a master-in-chancery, and Miss
Brown, of New York, daughter of a master-carpenter:—
for the former gentleman is about as far below an
earl as the latter is below any aristocrat of New York,
supposed or acknowledged.

Miss Brown, of the Bowery, is a lovely creature.
She excites curiosity in Broadway. She hinders devotion,
right and left, when she turns round in church.
In the best society of New York there is not a prettier
girl, and nature has made her elegant in her manners,
and education has done as much for her as was
at all necessary. Her father delights in her beauty,
and her mother is very proud of her, and she carries
her heart in her bosom to do what she pleases with it—
but neither Mr. Brown, nor Mrs. Brown, nor Miss
Brown, ever dream that her beauty will advance their
condition in life one peg. They love her for it—she
controls the family by it—she exercises influence as
a belle in their own circle of acquaintance—but that
is all. She lives a very gay and pleasant life, hears
of balls in more fashionable parts of the town without
dreaming that, for her beauty, she should be there,
and continues a Bowery belle till she marries a Bowery
beau. And beauty, once married, in that class
of our country, is like a pair of shoes once sold—
never inquired for again.

Miss Smith, of London, is a superb girl. Her father
was of dark complexion and her mother a blonde;
and jet and pearl have done their daintiest in her dark
eyes and radiant skin. At twelve she is considered a
beauty past accident. Her sisters, who were either
“all father” or “all mother,” grimy dark, or parsnip
blonde, are married off to such husbands as would undertake
them. But for the youngest there is a different
destiny—for she is a beauty. The father wishes
for advancement and a title. The mother wishes to
figure in high life before she dies. And Miss Smith,
young as she is, is taught the difference between a
plain young lord in a cab and a handsome lawyer's
clerk with a green bag. Beauty, well managed, may
be made to open every door in England. Masters—
the best of masters for Miss Smith! More money
is spent in “finishing” her than was given to all her
sisters for dowries. She is permitted to form few
acquaintances of her own sex, none of the other.
And when Miss Smith is sixteen, Mrs. Smith makes
her first strong push at Lady Frippery (for Mr. Smith
has put Lord Frippery under obligations, which make
it inevitable that the first favor asked should be granted),
and out comes Miss Smith, chaperoned by Lady
Frippery at a mixed subscription ball. It is for the benefit
of the Poles, and the liberal nobility are all there;
and all the beaux of St. James's street, of course, for they
like to see what novelty will turn up in such places.
One hour after the ball opens, Miss Smith's beauty has
been pronounced upon by half the noble eyes of London,
and Lady Frippery is assailed for introductions.
The beauty turns out high-bred. Lord George and
Lord Frederick torment their Right Honorable mammas
into calling on Mrs. Smith, and having the
beauty at their next ball; and so climbs Miss Smith
to a stratum of society unattainable by her father's
law or her mother's wealth, or anything in the world
but beauty. She is carefully watched, keeps herself
chary, and by-and-by chooses between Lord Freder
ick and Lord George, and elevates her whole family
by an alliance with the peerage—for in England there
is no mésalliance if the lady descended to be of great
beauty, as well as virtuous, modest, and well educated.

But—as we would show by these examples—personal
beauty is undervalued in America. At least, it
is less valued than in England and older countries.
An eminent English artist, recently returned home,
expressed his surprise that he had so few beauties
among his sitters. “The motive to have a miniature
done,” said he, “seems, in America, to be affection.
In England it is pride. Most of my sitters” (and he
had a great many at a very high price) “have been
old people or invalids, or persons going away; and
though they wished their pictures made as good-looking
as possible, their claim to good looks was no part
of the reason for sitting. It was only to perpetuate
that which was loved and would soon be lost.”

Pray take notice, madam, that we give no opinion
as to the desirableness of the English value of beauty.
Whether beauty and worldly profit should be kept
separate, like church and state—whether it is desecrated
by aiding the uses of ambition—whether it should
be the loadstar of affection or pride—we leave with
you as an open question.

We know nothing of a more restless tendency than
a fine, old-fashioned June day—one that begins with
a morning damp with a fresh south wind, and gradually
clears away in a thin white mist, till the sun
shines through at last, genial and luxurious, but not
sultry, and everything looks clear and bright in the
transparent atmosphere. We know nothing which so
seduces the very eye and spirit of a man, and stirs in
him that gipsy longing, which, spite of disgrace and
punishment, made him a truant in his boyhood.
There is an expansive rarity in the air of such a day—
a something that lifts up the lungs, and plays in the
nostrils with a delicious sensation of freshness and
elasticity. The close room grows sadly dull under it.
The half-open blind, with its tempting glimpse of the
sky, and branch of idle leaves flickering in the sun,
has a strange witchery. The poor pursuits of this
drossy world grow passing insignificant; and the
scrawled and blotted manuscripts of an editor's table—
pleasant anodyne as they are when the wind is in
the east—are, at these seasons, but the “Diary of an
Ennuyee”—the notched calendar of confinement and
unrest. The commendatory sentence stands half-completed;
the fate of the author under review, with
his two volumes, is altogether of less importance than
five minutes of the life of that tame pigeon that sits
on the eaves washing his white breast in the spout;
and the public good-will and the cause of literature,
and our own precarious livelihood, all fade into dim
shadow, and leave us listening dreamily to the creeping
of the sweet south upon the vine, or the far-off
rattle of the hourly, with its freight of happy bowlers
and gentlemen of suburban idleness.

What is it to us, when the sun is shining, and the
winds bland and balmy, and the moist roads with their
fresh smell of earth tempting us away to the hills—
what is it, then, to us, whether a poor-devil-author
has a flaw in his style, or our own leading article a
“local habitation and a name?” Are we to thrust
down our heart like a reptile into its cage, and close
our shutter to the cheerful light, and our ear to all
sounds of out-door happiness? Are we to smother
our uneasy impulses, and chain ourselves down to a
poor, dry thought, that has neither light, nor music,
nor any spell in it, save the poor necessity of occupation?
Shall we forget the turn in the green lane
where we are wont to loiter in our drive, and the cool

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claret of our friend at the Hermitage, and the glorious
golden summer sunset in which we bowl away to the
city—musing and refreshed? Alas—yes! the heart
must be closed, and the green lane and the friend that
is happier than we (for he is idle) must be forgotten,
and the dry thought must be dragged up like a wilful
steer and yoked to its fellow, and the magnificent sunset,
with all its glorious dreams and forgetful happiness,
must be seen in the pauses of articles, and
the “bleared een” of painful attention—and all this
in June—prodigal June—when the very worm is all
day out in the sun, and the birds scarce stop their
singing from the gray light to the dewfall!

What an insufferable state of the thermometer!
We knock under to Heraclitus, that fire is the first
principle of all things. Fahrenheit at one hundred
degrees in the shade! Our curtain in the attic
unstirred! Our japonica drooping its great white
flowers lower and lower. It is a fair scene, indeed!
not a ripple from the pier to the castle, and the surface
of the water, as Shelley says, “like a plane of
glass spread out between two heavens”—and there is
a solitary sloop, with the light and shade flickering on
its loose sail, positively hung in the air—and a gull, it
is refreshing to see him, keeping down with his white
wings close to the water, as if to meet his own snowy
and perfect shadow. Was ever such intense, unmitigated
sunshine? There is nothing on the hard,
opaque sky, but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief
on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the
shadow of that tall chimney is as definite as a hair,
and the young elm that leans over the fence is copied
in perfect and motionless leaves like a very painting
on the broad sidewalk. How delightful the night
will be after such a deluge of light! How beautiful
the modest rays of the starlight, and the cool dark
blue of the heavens will seem after the dazzling clearness
of this sultry noon! It reminds one of that exquisite
passage in Thalaba, where the spirit-bird
comes, when his eyes are blinded with the intense
brightness of the snow, and spreads her green wings
before him!

I went to the Opera last night for the first time.
The theatre was filled half an hour before the rising
of the curtain, and with a very fashionable audience.
The ladies had not quite made up their minds whether
it was a full-dress affair, but the pit and boxes had a
very paré look. The neighborhood of the orchestra,
particularly, looked very Parisian and dressy, as the
French beaux (whose heads are distinguishable from
Yankee heads by their soigne trimness and polish)
crystallize to the beau-nucleus of foreign theatres—
the stalles between stage and pit! One of the dropcurtains
was a view of Paris; and the principal curtain,
though representing, I believe, the Croton reservoirs,
had a foreground of figures such as are never
to be seen on this side of the Atlantic.

The opera was “L'Ambassadrice, by Auber,” and
the orchestra played the overture with a spirit and finish
of execution which was quite enchanting. It
was much the highest treat in music which I have
yet had in this country. The story of the opera has
been the rounds of the papers—an actress marrying
an ambassador, trying the mortifications and vexations
of sudden elevation to high-life, and returning to her
profession. As a play, it was very indifferently performed,
with the exception only of the part of the
duenna by Madame Mathieu. As an actress of comedy
(if I may judge after seeing her once) we have no
one in our theatres at all comparable to this lady.
Madame Lecourt was next best, and the rest, as players,
were not worth criticising. As an opera, the music
rested entirely on the orchestra and the prima donna,
the tenor being good for nothing, and the rest
mere stopgaps. The great attraction put forward in
the advertisements was Mademoiselle Calvé, the prima
donna, and, seeing and hearing her over such very
large capitals, I was somewhat disappointed. Mademoiselle
Calvé has had a very narrow escape of being
a remarkably pretty person. Indeed, filled out to
her model—plump as Nature intended her to be—she
would be very handsome; and to be what every young
Frenchwoman is, is far on the road to beauty—grace
and manner, which are common to them all, having
so much to do with the effect of the celestial gift.
But though she trips charmingly across the stage,
gives charming glances, dresses charmingly, and would
probably be a very charming acquaintance, she is an
inanimate and inexpressive actress. When, for example,
she discovers suddenly that her old lover is in
her presence (she becomes a dutchess and he still in
his profession as first tenor), she exclaims, “Benedict!”
as quietly as if she were calling her brother to
bring her a chair. There is no interest in her acting—
far less any enthusiasm or passion. She sings,
however, with great sweetness and correctness, and,
if she were not over-advertised, she would probably
surprise most persons agreeably. After all, she is a
great acquisition to the amusements of the city, and
I hope, for one, that she and the “troop” may find it
worth their while to do pendulum regularly between
this and New Orleans.

Niblo's Garden opened last week for the season,
and to compare it to “a scene of enchantment” would
be doing great injustice to its things to drink. I specify
this because public gardens are commonly very
slipslop in what they term their “refreshments,” and
(as it was a very exhausting night for the bodily
juices) we had an opportunity of testing the quality
of ices and “coblers.” This aside, there is a great
deal about Niblo's, probably, that is very like enchantment.
The ticket (price fifty cents) admits you to a
brilliantly-illuminated hall, opening on one side to a
delicious conservatory full of the rarest plants, and on
the other to a labyrinthine garden glittering with
lights and flowers; large mirrors at either end of the
hall make it look interminable, and the walks are so
ingeniously twisted around fountains and shrubberies,
as to seem interminable too; and in the immense hall
of refreshment there is a bifrons bar, which effectually
embarrasses you as to the geography of your julep—
all very mystical and stimulative. Thus far,
however, it is only tributary to the French theatre,
which is completely open on one side to the garden,
with half the audience out of doors, and the lobby as
cool and summery as a garden-alley. Between the
acts the audience go out and air and ice themselves,
and a resounding gong gives notice to the stragglers
in the labyrinths that the curtain is rising. I have
seen no public place so well appointed as this—waiters
badged and numbered—seats commodious, and service
prompt—and, above all, a very strict watch at the
door for the exclusion of miscellany.

The play was “Le Vicomte de Peturieres”—a kind
of Frenchification of Don Juan. The young vaurien
was played by Madame Lecourt, and played with a
charm of talent and vivacity for which her personification
of Charlotte, in “L'Ambassadrice,” had not
prepared me. She is the very soul of witching espieglerie,
and made love and did mischief in her hose
and doublet to the perfect delight of the audience.
The other members of the French company have
very much improved on the public liking since their
first appearance, and, with more or less excellence,
they all belong to a good school of acting. The prima
donna, Mademoiselle Calvé, is too ill to appear.

One likes to see every best thing of its kind in the
world, and never having been present at any of the

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Fashion's races, I took a cold ride to Long Island
to see her gallop over the course. On the way I
picked up some of the statistics of milk, from a communicative
fellow-passenger “who knew,” and it
may or may not surprise you to know that there are
three qualities in this supposed innocent simple of nature.
There is milk—milk once watered, and milk
twice watered; and sold as such, with three prices, by
the owners of the dairies, to the venders in the city.
A friend of my companion is a dairyman, he told me,
and supplies the American hotel with milk No. 1, at
a high price; so that in the milk line, at least, we
may certify that Mr. Cozzens cozens us not. Unluckily
for the Long Island cowmongers, the long arm
of the Erie railroad has taken to milking Orange
county for the New York market, and the profits of
milk and water have very much diminished with the
competition.

It was the great day of the Union races, but the
course presented a very dreary sight. There were
just people enough to make solitude visible, and the
“timer” in the stand looked as bleak as a bell-ringer
setting the clock on a cold day in a country belfry.
Here and there one of the jockey-club walked about
with his blue badge forlorn in his buttonhole, and
here and there an unhappy-looking pie-seller set down
his full baskets to blow his fingers; and there were a
few sporting trotters in sulkies, and two turnouts such
as are common at races, and a wight or two like myself
wondering who enjoyed the “sport” except the
riders. All of a sudden a single horse was discovered
half round the course, and before I could find out
what it was, Fashion had made one of her two-hundred-dollar
rounds. To take the eight hundred (uncontested
sweepstakes), she was obliged to go around
four times, and I had a good opportunity to see her
movement. She is smaller than I expected, and runs
less like a horse and more like a greyhound than any
racer I have seen. Sorrel is a color I dislike in beard
or horsehair, and her complexion suited me not; but,
in make, action, and particularly in expression of face,
Fashion is an admirable creature. Of course it takes
a sporting-eye to admire the tension of muscle in
high training, and the queen of the course would be
a better model for a sculptor after a month's grass;
but she is a beautiful sight, and even with the little I
have seen of her, I should know her again among a
thousand horses—so marked is superiority, in horse or
man.

The other races were nothing very extraordinary.
I started for home, cold and sorry. On the road our
jarvey stopped to “water horses and liquor passengers,”
and I got sight of a dance calculated to soften
my next criticism of the Park ballet. A ferret-eyed
fiddler struck up a tune, and an old farmer with gray
hairs and one “hermit tooth,” jumped into the middle
of the barroom and commenced a jig. As the
spring of his instep had gone with his teeth, he did
the work on his unmitigated heels, and a more sturdy
performance I never saw. He danced in greatcoat
and hat, with whip in hand, and, after ending his
dance by jumping up into a chair and dropping down
from it like a pavior's beetle, he paid for amusing the
spectators (and this was not à la Fanny the “divine”)
by giving the fiddler half a dollar. With a look
round at the company, and an inquiry whether anybody
would like “something wet,” he took his drink
and got into his wagon. This is one man's taste in a
flare-up.

There is a great change in the “surface of society”
within the last two days—straw and white hats having
become nearly universal. As we are a nation of black
coats (the English call Broadway a procession of undertakers),
this somewhat brightens up the superficial
aspect of the city. Summer came upon us with a
jump out of a raw easterly fog, and what with the
lack of premonition, and the natural incredulity of
flannel waistcoats, people went about yesterday clad
for cold weather and looking uncomfortably hot. To-day
the surprised clouds are gathering for a thunderstorm.

I see by the papers that the snow prophesied for
June by Lorenzo Dow, has fallen in several parts of
the country. The other two horns of his triple
prophesy for June, 1843, have also come true, for
there is “no king in England,” and “no president
over the United States”—strictly speaking.

I quite longed yesterday for a magnetic eye, to
look into the heads of two or three Chinese who
were let loose in the vestibule of the Astor, newly
landed from a Canton trader. Their “first impressions”
of New York, fully daguerreotyped, would be
amusing. I understand they have come over in the
suite of the Rev. Mr. Boone, missionary from Kulang-sa
(wherever that is).

During the summer solstice, the guests at the gentleman's
ordinary at the Astor are to be furnished
with linen jackets to dine in—one on the back of every
chair, “without respect of (the size of) persons.”
I am told privately that half the expense of these airy
furnishings is borne by the venders of fancy suspenders,
as it is presumed that no gentleman will be willing
to “shift himself” before company who is not daintily
provided in this line.

Fond, as we are reproached with being, of foreigners
in the ornamental walks of society, I observe, by
the general tenor of advertisements, that we prefer the
indigenous worky. “Wanted,” says an advertiser in
the True Sun, “a smart American woman who can go
right through with the work of a small religious family.”
Vague as this specification would seem to an
English eye, the advertiser's want is most definitely
expressed to an American.

You will have seen with regret the accounts of the
sudden death of Mr. Abbott—one of the few remaining
actors of the Kemble school. He was, in private
life, one of the most agreeable and cultivated of men,
and is deeply regretted. I understand that his widow
is entitled to a pension from the Theatrical Fund of
London, of about seven hundred dollars per annum.
She was married to him a few months since—a Miss
Buloid of the Park theatre. Abbott is said to have
been, in his youth, one of the gay associates of the
Prince of Wales.

The Broughams have returned from Boston, and
commenced an engagement at the Park Theatre.
We are likely to have no more theatrical importations
for some time, I think, the late declension of the
drama having somewhat damped the repute in London
of American starring. Actors coming out, now,
require an advance, and an insurance of a certain degree
of success, and this our managers are not in a
condition to pay. The sufferers by theatrical depression
in this country are the actors, who do not get
their money unless they draw it. In England the
manager must pay his company, by the law of rigorous
usage, and he is the sufferer till his theatre closes.

Booth has been playing wonderfully well at the
Park of late, and I understand that the pretty Mrs.
Hunt has been cast in one or two new characters,
which have drawn out her abilities, very much to the
pleasure and surprise of the theatre-goers.

Broadway has a very holyday aspect now from the
competition in the splendor of omnibuses. Several
new ones of mammoth size have been turned out,
drawn by four and six horses, and painted in the gayest
colors. The handsomest one I have seen is called
“The Edwin Forrest.”

The Scotch, who have formed themselves into a
military company, and dress in the uniform of the

[figure description] Page 017.[end figure description]

highland regiments of the British army, came out
yesterday in philebig and tartan, making a most imposing
and gallant appearance. The bare legs looked
rather cool in Broadway, but nature suits the animal
to his native climate, and Scotch legs are very comfortably
hairy I observed that a physician, with no
distinctive dress except a plaid scarf over his shoulder,
walked with the lieutenant—ready for ministering
to any member of the corps who might find the
exposure unsalutary. He should be skilled in curing
rheumatism, I should say. Apropos of adaptations of
the physiological features to climate, it is said, I know
not with how much truth, that there are islands north
of Great Britain where the females are web-footed.
Hence, perhaps, Grace Darling's heroic self-confidence
on the water.

New York is all alive with a new musical prodigy—
Mr. Wallace. There is no doubt that he is so far the
best pianist we have ever heard in this country, as to
dwarf all others in comparison. The musical people
all allow this with enthusiasm. As a violinist, those
who should know say he is equal to Paganini. I have
not heard him, but I understand he is a most unconscious
man of genius, very eccentric, and is on his
way back to Ireland, after having traversed South and
North America on foot. His pedestrian and musical
passions are strangely compounded. He has set to a
magnificent air a national anthem, which has been
sung by the class under the direction of Mr. George
Loder, of this city, with immense effect. In this anthem
Mr. Wallace has made a remarkable contribution
to the musical stores of this country.

Editors have a very sublime way of lumping Europe,
Asia, Africa, and America, and under the diminished
monosyllable of the “world,” spanning it with
their reflections as they would shade an ant-hill with
an umbrella. We tell you with becoming coolness
what the “gay world” is about, viz.: that a few families
up-town have taken to giving matinées. By the
“pious world,” we convey the Broadway Tabernacle—
by the “mercantile world,” Wall street or Pearl. The
English have become tired of the phrase, and call the
world “Mrs. Grundy.” What will be said about anything,
anywhere between the antipodes, is, “what will
Mrs. Grundy say?” And we like this—(as we like
anything which aggrandizes the editorial individual)—
only there is the little inconvenience, that when we
wish to speak of the world, as defined in the dictionary,
we are subjected to a periphrasis which cumbers
our style, or we have to explain that we really mean
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.

The world is getting on—wrote we at the head of
this article, and scratched it out again till we had made
a comment on the phrase. We were going into a
little disquisition on the evident approach of a new
order of things under the sun, as shown by wonderful
changes and discoveries all over the world—apropos,
however, of a very interesting book which has just
fallen into our hands, and of which we wish to give the
essence to the reader, in brief. We will omit the disquisition
on the approach of the millenium (to write
which, to say the truth, we sat down this morning),
for the weather is too hot, on second thoughts, to do
more than allude to a subject connected with a general
conflagration. Let us come at once to the book
in question.

Elevation by hemp has been considered a sovereign
remedy for low spirits, and indeed for most of the intolerable
evils of life—subject, however, to the drawback
that the remedy could be used but once. Will our
readers believe that this drawback is entirely removed
by a late discovery?

Intoxication has been long known to be a state of very
considerable happiness, subject to a “tariff which
amounts to a prohibition,” viz.: complete destruction
of the physical man by the residuum. Will the
reader believe that, by this same discovery, the residuous
penalty is removed?

By the same discovery, the hydrophobia is changed
to a death of physical pleasure—acute and chronic
rheumatism are first modified into ecstasy, then
cured—a “persuasion of high rank” is engendered in
the bosom of the humblest, a “feeling as if flying” is
communicated to the dullest and most plethoric. And
all this with no penalty, no subsequent physical prostration,
none of the long train of evils which, till now,
have been the inseparable pursuers of intoxication.

In telling our readers thus much, we have given
them the butt-end of one of the most curious subjects
we have for a long time been called upon to handle.
What we have said is far from a joke. A drug has
been discovered by the English in India, which has
these wonderful properties; and the mode in which it
is gathered, which we will tell with the same buttendity,
is as novel as the drug. “Men clad in leathern
dresses run through the fields, brushing through the
plant with all possible violence; the soft resin adheres
to the leather, and is subsequently scraped off, and
kneaded into balls. In Nipal the leathern attire is
dispensed with, and the resin is gathered on the skins
of naked natives.”

The plant from which this extraordinary drug is extracted,
is Indian hemp; differing from the hemp of
this and other northern countries only by the presence
of this narcotic stimulant. There are several preparations
of it—one for smoking, one for sweetmeats, and
others for beverages and medical compounds—but the
effects are, with slight variations, the same. “From
the beverage, intoxication ensues in half an hour.
The inebriation is of the most cheerful kind, causing
the person to sing and dance, to eat food with great
relish. The intoxication lasts about three hours,
when sleep supervenes. No nausea or sickness of the
stomach succeeds, nor are the bowels at all affected.”

The preparation for smoking is called gunjah, the
confection is called majoon, and the resin is called
churrus. Gunjah is used for smoking only. One
hundred and eighty grains, and a little dried tobacco,
are rubbed in the palm of the hand, with a few drops
of water. This suffices for three persons. A little
tobacco is placed in the pipe first, then a layer of the
prepared gunjah, then more tobacco, and the fire
above all.

Four or five persons usually join in this debauch.
The hookah is passed round, and each person takes a
single draught. Intoxication ensues almost instantly;
and from one draught to the unaccustomed, within
half an hour; and after four or five inspirations to
those more practised in the vice. The effects differ
from those occasioned by the sidhee. Heaviness, laziness,
and agreeable reveries, ensue; but the person
can be readily roused, and is able to discharge routine
occupations, such as pulling the punkah, waiting at
table, &c. We add the following passages from the
treatise:—

“The fourth case of trial was an old muscular
cooley, a rheumatic malingerer, and to him half a
grain of hemp resin was given in a little spirit. The
first day's report will suffice for all: In two hours the
old gentleman became talkative and musical, told several
stories, and sang songs to a circle of highly-delighted
auditors, ate the dinners of two persons subscribed
for him in the ward, sought also for other luxuries
we can scarcely venture to allude to, and finally
fell soundly asleep, and so continued till the following
morning. On the noonday visit, he expressed himself
free from headache or any other unpleasant sequel,
and begged hard for a repetition of the medicine, in

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

which he was indulged for a few days and then discharged.

“While the preceding case was under treatment,
and exciting the utmost interest in the school, several
pupils commenced experiments on themselves to ascertain
the effects of the drug. In all, the state of the
pulse was noted before taking a dose, and subsequently
the effects were observed by two pupils of much intelligence.
The result of several trials was, that in as
small doses as a quarter of a grain the pulse was
increased in fulness and frequency; the surface of
the body glowed; the appetite became extraordinary;
vivid ideas crowded the mind; unusual loquacity occurred;
and, with scarcely any exception, great aphrodisia
was experienced.

“In one pupil, Dinonath Dhur, a retiring lad of
excellent habits, ten drops of the tincture, equal to a
quarter of a grain of the resin, induced in twenty
minutes the most amusing effects I ever witnessed. A
shout of laughter ushered in the symptoms, and a
transitory state of cataleptic rigidity occurred for two
or three minutes. Summoned to witness the effects,
we found him enacting the part of a rajah giving orders
to his courtiers. He could recognise none of his
fellow-students or acquaintances; all, to his mind,
seemed as altered as his own condition. He spoke
of many years having passed since his student's days;
described his teachers and friends with a piquancy
which a dramatist would envy; detailed the adventures
of an imaginary series of years, his travels, his attainment
of wealth and power. He entered on discussions
on religious, scientific, and political topics, with
astonishing eloquence, and disclosed an extent of
knowledge, reading, and a ready, apposite wit, which
those who knew him best were altogether unprepared
for. For three hours, and upward, he maintained the
character he at first assumed, and with a degree of
ease and dignity perfectly becoming his high situation.
A scene more interesting, it would be difficult to imagine.
It terminated nearly as suddenly as it commenced,
and no headache, sickness, or other unpleasant
symptom, followed the innocent excess.”

The treatise on this subject, from which we have
made the foregoing extracts, is a reprint from the
Transactions of the Medical Society of Calcutta, and
written by a surgeon in the Bengal army, Mr.
O'Shanghnessy, now in this country. It is, as our
readers will have seen by the extracts, a very able
treatise; and the experiments, of which we had only
room to quote here and there an exponent passage,
are described with most lucid clearness. We may
refer to this interesting topic again.

On the day the president arrived, the be-windowed
houses of New York seemed to have none too many
windows, and if all the men on the tiles had been Tyler
men, the president's party might for once have
been declared formidably uppermost. We know several
things since Mr. Tyler's visit: how many people
roofs will hold; how many heads can look out of one
window; for how little ladies will wave their pocket-handkerchiefs;
“what swells the soldier's warlike
breast” (or, rather, what becomes of all the cotton);
how much extra horse hair it takes to make a dragoon;
how unanimous a prayer may be put up by
four hundred thousand people, for the cutting of the
hair of a “prince royal;” how the devils may be cast
out of a barouche and four, commonly used to take
frailty to the races, and how a chief magistrate and his
suite may innocently enter in; how gayly a city may
be dressed with flags, partly for the president of fifteen
millions of freemen, and partly for the “fat girl”
of the museum; what endurance of horses' hoofs lies
in the toes of female “freemen;” and how long and
far, at a “sink-a-pace,” will last the smile of Mr.
Tyler.

I presume the entire sanitary and locomotive population
of New York turned out to the show, and a very
fine show it was altogether. The military companies
would alone have made a sight worth coming far to see,
for (by the measurement on Broadway) their brilliant
uniforms cover a mile and a half—an expanse of tailoring
(with the exception of the trouserless Highlanders)
that should make politicians deal kindly with
“cross-legs.” I remarked, by the way, that, though
all the officers of the companies are not fat men, all
the fat men among them are officers—a tribute to
avoirdupois which should delight the ghost of Sir
John Falstaff, spite of his “give me the spare men,
and spare me the great ones.” I saw one of the
plethoric captains rubbing the calf of his leg, after his
march of five of six miles over the round stones, and
I presume he might have said to the “prince royal,”
as Sir John did at Gadshill, “S'blood! I'll not bear
mine own flesh as far afoot again, for all the coin in
thy father's exchequer.”

Some English friends who were with me, expressed
continual wonder at the total absence of raggedness or
poverty in the dress of the populace. We can hardly
realize how striking is this feature of our country to
the eye of a European. They were a good deal
amused, too, with the republican license given to a
fellow on horseback, either drunk or saucy, who chose
to ride in the staff of one of the generals with his coat
off, and with the good-nature and forbearance manifested
by the crowd in their occasional resistings of the
encroachments of mounted constables.

I was told that not only the president, but his
friends and suite, were exceedingly surprised at the
reception given him. It was certainly, in every way,
calculated to show the honor paid by the people to
the office of the chief magistrate; and Mr. Tyler can
not but feel, that while hedged in with the dignity of
his office, he is an object of interest and attention
with which mere politics could have but little to do.

The president having got through with the weather
of New York, it was at liberty to rain next day, and it
rained. The clouds parenthesised his visit, laying the
dust the night before he arrived, and holding up till the
night after his departure. I presume it did not rain in
Boston next morning—King Lucky having occasion for
a dry day. I have heard of but one partial exception
to the accurate culmination of the Tyler star. The
officer in command on the Battery, finding that he
could not see through the walls of Castle Garden, requested
to have a flag raised, or some other sign given,
to make the movement for the salute, when the
president should land. “Oh!” said the marshal,
“you needn't bother about that. You'll know by
the cheers.” The cheers not being audible, however,
the artillery rather “hung fire,” letting off their congratulatory
welcome as the president landed—from
the high flight of his oration. He had been landed
from the steamboat some time before! Perhaps the
congratulation was well timed, and so, very likely,
his star (which must be a planet) intended to plan it.
A man should be felicitated when he touches terra
firma once more, after most public speeches.

There seems to be a finger pointing the way, even
in the picking of flowers by the wayside, for his happy
“Accidency.” Some pleasurable surprise has been
expressed at the careful zeal with which the president
kissed the ladies twice round on several occasions,
where a limited number had been introduced to him.
I was at a loss to know how a man, bred in a state
distinguished for the deferential proprieties, should
have jumped, ready-armed, to such an act of popularity,
when a visit to the presidential parlor at Howard's
explained the “starry influence.” A French
painting, with figures of the size of life, representing

[figure description] Page 019.[end figure description]

Don Juan giving Haidee a most realizing kiss, had
been introduced into the apartment by the sumptuary
committee! There it stood, a silent indication to
thought during his hours of revery, and as the mystic
intimation occupied, frame and all, one entire
wall of the room, the lesson was inevitable. Sequitur—
the above-mentioned liberal dispensation of kisses.

I am told that a game of chess is child's play to the
diplomacy at work, during the president's visit, for the
control of his movements. Office-seekers and office-holders,
“authorities,” private friends, Spartaus, repealers,
whigs, and locofocos, tugged at his ear and
button continually. I trust, if he is fond of contrast,
that his ex-excellency will try a second first impression
of New York a year or two hence.

The president's departure was most felicitous as to
weather—the loveliness of the sunset, and the beauty
of the bay, making up for him the finest of back-ground
effects. Some hundreds of people were on
the Battery, and the steamboat-wharf was crowded
with spectators. As the boat started, the crews of the
men-of-war ran up the rigging like disturbed ants, and
saluted her as she passed with three cheers. He went
out of the harbor with relays of “Hail Columbia,”
the band on board the boat beginning with it, and the
two ships taking it up as he went along. So Columbia
is decidedly hailed—if it will do it any good!

I saw an amusing resurrection of a horse yesterday.
One of the military companies were marching gayly
down the street on their way to embark for Boston,
when a blind horse in a swill-cart, whose calamity was
forgotten for the instant by his occupied master,
walked deliberately into one of the Croton excavations.
The harness was just strong enough to break
his fall, the cart was left above ground, and he stood
on the bottom, as comfortably out of the way as
“truth in a well.” The driver was a man for an
emergency, and, indeed, acted so much as if it was
“part of the play,” that a Chinese traveller would
probably have recorded it as a melo-dramatic accompaniment
to the show. He took off his coat very quietly,
picked up one of the shovels of the absent workmen,
and commenced filling up the ditch. The loose
dirt went in very fast, and the horse, with an instinct
against being buried alive, rose with the surface.
From being some inches below the pavement,
his head was getting above ground when I left him;
and as the old man was still piling on very industriously,
I presume he soon had him once more at the
level of cock-crowing.

There have been various definitions of “a gentleman,”
but the prettiest and most poetic is that given
by a young lady of this city the other day: “A gentleman,”
said she, “is a human being, combining a
woman's tenderness with a man's courage.”

“Cheap literature” is shaking in its shoes. I understand
the publishers “see the expediency” of making
their editions more costly, and accommodating
them to the smaller sales. The great American maw
is surfeited with “new novels” at last. I trust that
booksellers and authors will now become slightly acquainted.

What shall it be? If we understand you rightly,
you would prefer on this last page, some well-contrived
nonsense—to wind off trippingly, as it were.
Wisdom is respectable. Pictures, poetry, prose, pathos,
and puffery, are all very well—but after being
instructed, you wish to be let out of school. Is
that it?

Something about “town,” of course. Folly lives
here, all the year round. Fashion is exclusively urban.
And when we have mentioned these two, we
have named the persons in our acquaintance about
whom there is, by much, the liveliest curiosity. What
Folly is doing in town, and what is the last antic of
Fashion, are departments of news that are read before
the deaths and marriages—“as nobody can deny.”
Fashion be our theme, then, “for the nonce.” We
would devote this page to it eternally, if we dared.
That we should please you by so doing, we very well
know. But the owl is the king of types, and wisdom
has, of print, a chartered monopoly—hang her!

Well, madam, the fashions. Let us begin at the
small end of the horn, and touch first upon the crockery
sex—winding off with the china and porcelain.

The gentlemen, who had been previously let up,
have been lately let down. Straps were abandoned by
the cognoscenti last autumn—with the first “slosh.”
Suspenders were abandoned with the first intimation
of the present summer solstice. There is at present
no unnatural restraint upon trousers. They are prevented
from coming up by their natural gravity—from
coming down by being “caught on the hip.” Shoulders
are emancipated from the caprices of genuflection.
The hollow of the foot suffers no longer from
the shrug of incredulity. The nether man, in short,
is free, sovereign, and independent.

Among the advantages of this revolution is the
cleanly circumstance that the boot, in its nightly exit,
is no longer compelled to make a thoroughfare of the
leg of the pantaloon. This is an “inexpressible” relief.
Buttons, also, are subjected no longer to the
severe trials of stooping. Boots, unhappily, can no
longer conceal their “often infirmities”—high polish
and indifference to surprise and exposure being indispensable
accompaniments to their present loose associations.
As an offset to the expensiveness of this,
the pantaloons themselves will not be so frequently
in-kneed.

Frock-coats are going out of fashion, and Newmarket
cut-aways are worn for the morning. Very well
for those who have small hips, as the latter are rather
spready. This exacts also great tidiness in the cut of
the “continuations.” Waistcoats are made longer,
and with drooping wings, to conceal any little vagaries
in the newly emancipated trousers. But this, too,
exaggerates unbecomingly the apparent size of the
hips. “The pyramid inverted” is our model, by the
laws of art, as the “pyramid proper” is that of the
ladies. Gaiters are the mode—but they require a
neat pastern. Your greyhound breed of man looks
well in them. They should be made separate from
the shoe, for they require washing, and your unscrupulous
dingy shoe is an abomination. Patent leather,
of course, till death.

Hats are a delicate subject. There should be as
many fashions of them as there are varieties of human
faces. Indeed, hats should be destined and allotted
to men, as irrevocably as noses and hair—suitable by
infallible harmonies of physiognomy. We should be
born in hats—hats that would grow without materially
altering in shape or expression. We would as soon
let a barber choose us a nose as a hatter a hat. And
as to a fashion in hats—one fashion for all men—
where is thy rebuke, oh Nature, tortured and travestied!
But still, fashions there be! John Bull is at
present wearing his hat very small—the Frenchman is
wearing his very large. The Yankee wears his very
peaked—the German wears his very flat. We scorn
to give the encouragement of print to any one of
these. Suit yourself—since Nature has left you unfinished.
Take counsel of an artist or of a woman.
Buy no hat rashly.

As to the ladies, we would not, like

“Fools, rush in where angels fear to tread,”

[figure description] Page 020.[end figure description]

season. We meet our few sins of idolatry in the very
bonnets, the very boddices, the very namelessnesses
of last year's product and admiration! Are the brains
of milliners subject to drought? Is invention dried up—
fancy, imagination, quite squeezed dry? Are we to
be subjected to sameness in angels—one eternal and
unchanging exterior? Forbid it, while the world
continues sinful, oh sumptuary powers! We could
not bear, in our present state of mind, the angelic livery
of one eternal gown (wings, if you like to call it
so), with no new hat, no ravishing garniture for the
shoulders! Oh no! Immolate the milliners for their
dull brains! Turn your genius into this seemingly
exhausted channel, oh, unemployed painters! Show
us woman—like the opal or the cloud—dressed in
new colors whenever she comes into the sun! Adorably
sweet as she is, she is sweeter for the outer spice
of variety!

If to lack classes of society which another nation
possesses, be a falling behind that nation in refinement
(query, whether!), we are behind England, at
least, in this degree, that we possess no class of table-talkers.
Dinner-parties in this country are gatherings-together
of friends, chiefly to eat, and to chat,
as it may happen. The host has been at great pains
to procure a haunch of venison, but he has not
thought of “the wit” for dinuer. He has neither
overlooked the olives nor the currant-jelly—but, alas!
the attic salt is forgotten! The tomatoes will flank
the roast, and the celery-sauce the boiled—but who
is to listen to Doctor Gabble, or draw out Alderman
Mumchance? There will be two misses and no “eligible,”
or two eligibles and no miss. The dinner is
arranged with studied selection, but the guests are invited
by the alphabet. The eating will be zealous and
satisfactory, but the “entertainment” as the god of
dulness pleases.

So provides not his dinner, this gentleman's foreign
correspondent (we take one of the same class), in
Russell square. Mr. Mordaunt Figgins (large trader
and small banker, of Throgmorton street) wishes, we
will say for example, to give a very smart and impressive
dinner to Mr. Washington, Wall street, just arrived
with a travelling credit from New York. The
butler sees to the dinner—ca va sans dirc. Who
shall be asked? Smith, of course. His jokes will be
all new to the Yankee, and it will look spirituelle to
have an author. He will be sure to come—for Figgins
discounts his bills. Put down Smith. Who
next? We must have a lord. Smith won't show off
without a lord, and the American will all but go into
fits to meet one at dinner. Let's see! There's old
Lord Fumble, always wanting to borrow ten pounds.
Put down Lord Fumble. So—a lord and a wit. Now,
two good listeners. They must be ladies, of course.
We shall have too many black-coats. What, ladies
listen, Mrs. Figgins? The Pimpkinsons. Well—they
are poor and stylish-looking, and the Yankee knows
nothing of the blue-book. Say the Pimpkinsons.
Now for a dandy or two, and one handsome woman
that flirts, in case Jonathan is a gay man. And, I
say, Mrs. Figgins, there'll be a spare seat, and you
may ask your mother—only she must dress well and
say nothing of “the shop.” And duly at eight
o'clock Mr. Figgins's guests arrive—Smith wishing
bills could be discounted without black-mail interest—
my Lord Fumble turning up his (inward) nose, but
relieved to meet Smith—the dandies hungry and supercilious—
the Misses P. delighted and frisky—and
the Yankee excessively well-dressed and dumbfounded
to meet Smith and a live lord. Smith talks to the
lord and at the Yankee, the rest play their parts “as
cast in the bill,” and everybody goes off delighted.
The dinner was a hit, and Smith was “never so bril
liant”—if Mrs. Figgins and Mr. Washington, Wall
street, can be relied on.

Let us glance at another phase of the “life of the
diner-out.” Mr. Smith has accepted one of his most
agreeable invitations—a west-end dinner, with a nobleman
for his host. Mr. Smith is the son of a music-master,
and of course was born with an indisputable
claim to the supreme contempt of his noble convives.
By his talents, and more particularly by his agreeable
powers, however, he has uncurled the lip of scorn,
and moves in aristocratic society, a privileged intruder.
In the drawing-room, before dinner, Mr. Smith
is ceremoniously polite—he is the one man in the company
who dare not venture to be at his ease. Dinner
is announced. The ladies are handed down by those
who are born his betters, and he follows, silent and
alone. He takes the seat that is left, wherever it be,
and feels that he must be agreeable to his neighbor,
whoever it be—at least till the conversation becomes
general, when he is expected to shine. Meantime
his brain is busier than his stomach, for he is watching
for an opening to a pun, and studying the guests
around him to arm his wit and lay traps for his stories.
If, by chance, he is moody or ill at ease, he
has not the noble privilege of reserve or silence.
Not to talk—Smith not to be funny—were outrageous!
“What was the man asked for?” would have been
the first exclamation after his departure. Oh, no! he
must be brilliant, coute qu'il coute; and as he is expected
to extemporize verses at the piano after dinner,
he must be cudgelling his invention at the same time
to get together the material, and weave in the current
news of the day, and the current scandal of the hour,
with, of course, the proper seasoning of compliment
to lords and ladies present. Hic, labor, hic opus est!
The dishes are removed and the desert is set on the
table, and Mr. Smith, who has hitherto kept up a
small fire of not very old puns on the meats and their
concomitants, becomes the object of general, but impassive
and supercilious expectation. His listeners
are waiting to be amused, without feeling the slightest
obligation to draw out his wit by their own, and after
this wet blanket has made his efforts hang fire for
some time, the master of the house calls for “that
very droll story”—the same song and story having
been not only told often before, but expanded and embellished
in the New Mouthly or the John Bull.
Wishing lords would tell stories of their own (which
they never do), and dreading lest the company are already
familiar with his story, Smith affects to select
one listener to whom it is quite new, and to tell it for
his individual amusement. In the midst of his narration,
he discovers by some maladroit interruption that
this person knows the story by heart, and, obliged to
finish it without the zest of novelty, he makes a
failure, and concludes amid a general silence. We
have seen this happen once, and, from the nature of
things, it must happen often. Who would wear such
laurels? Who would wish this state of society introduced—
this yet unforged link added to the social
chain of America?

It is the common argument with the advocates of a
monarchical form of government, that the arts and
literature would be better fostered—that the wealth
of which patronage is a growth, is only accumulated
by primogeniture and entail. Heaven defend us from
such fostering, say we! Heaven defend us from such
patronage! No, no! Genius is proud! Genius is
humbled and cowed, damped and degraded by patronage—
“patronage” so called, we mean. The man
gifted by his God with superiority to his fellows, does
not, without an anguish of shame, yield precedence
to the nobility of a king's patent. He is self-humbled
when he does it. He loses the sense of superiority,
without which he is no more noble in genius than the
knight is noble in the field when his spurs are hacked

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off by the herald. There is no equality, felt or understood,
between lord and author in England. It
pleases authors so to represent it in books, but they
never felt it. We have seen the favorites of the day
in their hour of favor, and heard enough said of them
to show us how much more would be said to ears
more confidential. Through all the abandon, through
all the familiarity of festive moments, when there is
nothing which could be named which marks a distinction
between noble and simple, there is an invisible
arm for ever extended, with reversed hand, which the
patronized author feels on his breast like a bar of iron.
He never puts it aside. He never loses the remembrance
of his inferiority. He is always a parasite—
always a belier of God's mark of greatness, the nobility
of mind.

If we are remarkable for anything worth putting
your finger on, it is for a kind of divining-rod faculty
that we have—useful to everybody but ourself. We
can point to hidden treasure with a dip infallible—if
it be for another man's benefit. In our own case, and
for our own profit, we are, like all enchanted rods
when dropped from the hand of the enchanter—a
manifest and incapable stick. In the exercise of this
vicarious faculty, we are about to take a walk up
Broadway (on paper), and by pointing to undiscovered
values, show to several persons how they can make
their fortunes.

Here we are at the Battery—the most popular resort
in town, and the most beautiful promenade in the
known world. Within three minutes' walk of this
lovely spot reside at least two or three thousand foreigners,
the lower part of Broadway being their chosen
and favorite quarter, and the “marine walk” their
constant lounge. Bachelors innumerable of our own
nation herd hereabout. The great baths of the city
are near by, and any additional inducement would be
the last drop in the bucket of attraction, and would
double the number of Battery-frequenters. Where
in the world beside, is there—unoccupied—such a
place for a café?

Dispossess yourself, dear reader, of all impressions
of cafés as you see them now, and of all idea of coffee
and other friandises such as are commonly served
to you in places so called. We speak of a Parisian
café—a palace of cushions, gilding and mirrors, sumptuous
as a thing rubbed out of the lamp of Aladdin,
and presided over by a queen of the counter in the
shape of a lady only less pretty than respectable.
We speak of a luxurious and fashionable saloon,
where, in the neighborhood of a lovely promenade,
gentlemen and their dames and daughters can find
faultless coffee, and faultless ices and fruits—a place
to resort to in the slow hours, to rest in after a walk, to
find refreshment after a bath, to meet friends and acquaintances.
Why, in any city of Europe there
would be dozens of cafés around a spot so enchanting.
And we are fast overtaking Europe in the taste for
these approved luxuries, and, in our opinion, the public
is quite ready for this! In the month of April
just gone by, there were placards “to let” upon the
doors of the two houses facing the Battery between
Greenwich street and Broadway. What an opportunity
lost! What safer investment of capital could
there be than to have expended a few thousand dollars
upon the lower story and basement of this block,
making of it a grand café? What in Europe could exceed
the beauty of the prospect from its windows and
doors, the freshness of its unpolluted air, the shade
upon its sidewalk from the magnificent trees in front,
and the charms of scenery and promenade immediately
adjoining? We only wonder that to such a
“call” of opportunity, a café did not spring through the
ground like a mushroom, ready furnished with coffee
and curacoa, silver spoons and a lady at the counter!

Since we are not a Frenchman, nor a German, not
an “adult alien” of any description, we are sorry to
say that these ultra-marine dwellers among us have
more taste than we for fine scenery, elegant resorts,
and fresh air. Foreigners monopolize the bright spot
of Manhattan. The Battery is their nucleus. Fashion,
indigenous fashion, has gone up town—an “up-town”
hedged off from the rivers on either side by
streets unfootworthy, and neighborhoods never penetrated
to the water-side on any errand but business—
leaving to foreigners the only spot in this vast
island-city where the view and fresh air of the sea are
decently accessible. On this string we have harped
before, and we leave it now with a little suggestion
that we can not so well bestow elsewhere—that while
this café project is in process of incubation, the authorities
would oblige us and the remainder of the
public by giving us a comfortable seat or two with
backs to them in the shady avenues of the Battery.

And now, to come up Broadway a little. In all
countries but this, rooms commanding advantages of
view have a proportionate high value as lodgings, and
are furnished and let accordingly. Without stopping
at the buildings whose value as residences are so much
increased by the oppositeness of the superb structure
and its leafy surroundings in Trinity churchyard, let
us come at once to the Park. From the corner of
the American Museum to the church in Beekman
street extends a line of buildings, the advantages of
which as to neighborhood and prospect would command
the highest price, as lodgings, in any other city
in the world. The superb fountain—the trees and
grass of the enclosure—the views of the magnificent
church and hotels, and the thronged pavement of
Broadway opposite, are all visible from those desirable
chambers. The large company of single gentlemen
who occupy rooms similarly situated in other cities—
gentlemen who want lodging-rooms and breakfast, and
dine wherever they like—are compelled to dive into
the dark side-streets, and either live in pent-up quarters
quite away from this centre of attraction, or undertake
the life of hotels which has, for many of
them, serious objections. Luxuriously fitted and
furnished, with a housekeeper and the usual appliances
of English lodging-houses, this line of buildings
would be unequalled in attractions to bachelors.
Everything they desire in a residence would be there
attained—centrality, comfort, and accessibility. We
recommend to the landlords who now let rooms, commanding
such advantages, for cheap lodgings, barber's
shops, and lumber-rooms, to turn their attention
forthwith to this obviously better account, and at the
same time embellish and improve the most conspicuous
part of the city.

We were going into various other details of the unimproved
capabilities of New York, but verbum sap.
Our drift is visible, and it is only necessary in reference
to such subjects to-set the wide-awake to thinking.

The extreme heats of the last week or two have
depopulated country-seats, and driven thousands from
the open glare and thin roofs of rural resorts, to the
shady sidewalks and stone walls of the more temperate
city. The dim and cool vestibules of the large hotels
are thronged with these driven-in strangers; and in
the refreshing atmosphere of the manifold iced drinks
and their varied odors of mint and pine-apple, they
bless Heaven for the cooling luxuries of cities, pitying
all those whose destiny or poverty confines them to
them unmitigated country. Enjoying, as we do, the
blessings of metropolitau protection in July, we feel
called upon to express our deep sympathy with those

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

unfortunate beings, who, in places of public resort, or
in private cottages, are fulfilling their sad destiny of
sultry exposure. The once porous hill-sides and valleys,
baked by the sun to the induration of a paved
street, lack the delicious sprinklings of Croton water-pipes.
The warm milestones, few and far between;
do but remind the scorched passer-by of the gushing
hydrants of Broadway. The tepid spruce-beer and
chalky soda-water of the country-inns only deepen the
agony of absence from “juleps” and “cobblers.”
What would not these poor sufferers give for a brick
block between them and the sun! How would they
not bless Heaven for the sight of the cold sweat on a
wall of unheated and impermeable granite! What
celestial bliss would it not be, to see, on a country
road, at every few yards' distance, black boys, unpaid
and unthanked, directing, like benign angels, streams
of the pellucid element across their sultry way! Ah!
the luxury, in the summer-heats, of city-walls and
city refrigerations!

It has been unreflectingly thought that there were
two classes of human beings overworked and uneared
for. It has been said that there was no Providence
for housemaids and editors. The predecessors of
these laborious animals, it was supposed, had, in some
previous metempsychosis, committed sins which
doomed their posterity to perpetual toil. It is true,
theirs is a destiny of crash, in a world, for others, of
comparative diaper and dimity. But, mark the alleviations!
The first of July comes round, and Heaven
inflicts upon the task-masters and mistresses of these
oppressed maids, a locomotive insanity. With toil
and sweat they pack up their voluminous traps, and
embarking in a seething boat they depart, panting and
red-faced, on their demented travels. They go from
place to place, packing and unpacking, fretting and
sweating from day to day, and arriving at last at the
grand fool-dom of Saratoga, they take up their lodging
for a month in chambers of pill-box dimensions,
pitiably persuaded that the smell of pine partitions,
and the pitchy closeness of shingled roofs reeking in
the sun, are the fragrance of the fields, and a blessed
relief from the close air of the city! So, for weeks,
they absent themselves, deluded. The housemaid,
meantime, has possession of the cool and spacious
dwellings deserted for her use. The dragged muscles
relax over her collar-bone and shoulders, for she has
now no water to carry up-stairs and down. She recovers
the elasticity in the small of her back, and the
natural distribution of red and white in her flushed
and overheated complexion. The well-contrived blinds,
closed in the freshness of the morning-hours, keep the
house cool and dim for her noontide repose. The spacious
drawing-rooms are hers, in which to wander at
will, barefoot if she likes, on the luxurious carpets.
The bath-rooms are near her bed, and the ice-man
comes daily to the door, and unless she choose to step
out upon the sidewalk at noon, she scarce need know
it is summer. Ah, the still coolness of thick brick
walls and ample rooms within! Her worn-out frame
recovers its powers, and in the goodness of her heart
she can afford to send pitying thoughts after the exiled
and infatuated sufferers at Saratoga!

Negatively blessed is her fellow-sufferer, the editor,
meantime—liable as he is to this same locomotive lunacy,
and kept within reach of enjoyable and health-preserving
luxuries by the un-let-up-able nature of his
vocation. Nor this alone. He has his minor reliefs.
Omni-acquainted as he necessarily is, and mostly with
the unhappy class self-exiled to the inclement country,
his weary arm now lies supine in delicious indolence
at his side. The habitual five hundred visits,
per diem, of his right hand to the rim of his hat, are
no more exacted. The two hundred and fifty suggestions,
per diem, as to the conduct of his paper, the
course of his politics, and his private morals, are no
longer to be thankfully received. The city is full, but
full of strangers, charmingly unconscious of his extreme
need of counsel. He walks to and fro at
ease, looking blandly at the hydrants, blandly at the
strange faces, blandly at the deliciously unfamiliar
contents of the omnibuses. He dwells in a crowd, in
heavenly solitude. He is like a magnetized finger on
the body of a man with a toothache—apart from the
common pulse, sequestered from the common pain—
yet in his habitual place and subject to no separation.
He has no engagements to meet gentlemen or committees,
for the better manufacture of public opinion.
He can shilling it to Staten Island for sea-air, or sixpence
it to Harlem for an evening sight of the blood-warm
grass, in blessed silence! And so fly the summer
months, like three leaves of the book of paradise
turned back by chance; and, refreshed with new courage,
the doomed editor renews, in September, the
multitudinous extras of his vocation. Oh kindly
Providence, even for housemaids and editors!

A true leaf from the thoughts of a woman of genius
on the subject of woman's love, is stuff to dwell upon
in the reading. We totally differ from one of the
sweetest writers of the time, Mrs. Seba Smith, on the
following disparaging passage touching the love of a
gentle and confiding woman as contrasted with that
of a proud one. Let our readers judge. The passage
occurs, by-the-way, in a story which is the gem
of the whole year of monthlies, called “The Proud
Ladye”—in Godey's Lady's Book. “The love of a
gentle and confiding woman, with its perpetual appeals
to tenderness and protection, must be dear, very
dear to a manly heart; but then it too often lacketh
that exclusive and earnest devotion which imparts a
last touch of value, its sympathies are too readily excited,
and the images of others, faint and shadowy it
may be, yet still images, too often sit, side by side, with
the beloved. But the love of a proud woman, with
its depths of untold tenderness, rarely stirred, yet,
when once awakened, welling up a perpetual fountain
of freshness and beauty, its concentred and earnest
faith, its unmingled sympathies, its pure shrine, raised
to the beloved, burning no incense upon strange altars,
and admitting no strange oblations, the love of such a
one should invest manhood with tenfold dignity—
should make him feel as a priest in the very presence
of the divinity.”

“Things lost in air” are not always unproductive,
Signora Castellan having received, last night, about
two thousand dollars for singing four songs. Signor
Giampietro, her husband, may well say that “a sweet
voice is a most excellent thing in woman.” I made
one of the twenty-five hundred who composed the
audience of this successful cantatrice last evening, and
having missed her introductory concert, this was the
first time I had seen her. I should take Madame
Castellan to be about twenty-three. She is a plump
little Jewess, with an advantage not common to plumptitude—
a very uppish and thoroughbred neck, charmingly
set on. A portrait of her dimpled shoulders
and the back of her head would be a fit subject for
Titian. Her countenance expresses an indolent sweetness,
with none of the wide-awakity so common to her
tribe—and, indeed, the description of the Persian
beauty by Hafiz occurred to me in looking at her:—

“Her heart is full of passion and her eyes are full of sleep.”

[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]

comparable to that wondeful woman. I certainly do not
think we have heard a voice in this country, not even
Malibran's, of more astonishing compass that Madame
Castellan's. There is not a chamber in her
throat where a cobweb could remain unswept for a
moment. Her contralto notes are far beyond the plummet
of ordinary “soundings,” and as rich and effortless
as the gurgle of a ringdove, while her soprano
tones go up with the buoyancy of a lark, and raise on
tiptoe all the audience who are not fortunate enough
to obtain seats. Still, in ascending and descending on
this angel's ladder, she misses a round now and then.
There are transitions which catch, somehow. She
wants fusion. In her trills more particularly, the balance
is one-sided, and there is a nerve in the listener's
besoin which is not reached by the warble. Give her
more practice, however, more passionateness or brandy
and water, and she would melt over these trifling
flaws, without a doubt. So near perfection as she is,
it seems almost impertinent to criticise her.

New York has some radii to its outer periphery
which are well worth the stranger's following in the
way of excursions. The promontory which makes
the jumping-off place at the seaward end of the Narrows,
is one of these, and upon it (next door to the
fishing-huts of Galway), stands one of the most luxurious
hotels in this country. A friend gave me a
delightful drive to it the other day, via a little flourish
among the knolls of Long Island, and, as it chanced
to be the hottest day of the season, I can speak advisedly
of the ocean air of Fort Hamilton. To be
handed over from the Battery to such a cool place, in
half an hour, by the long arm of a steamer, is one of
the possibilities that make New York very habitable.

The marvel of New York just now is “the Alhamra”—
an ice-cream resort lately opened a little
below Niblo's. The depth of the building on Broadway
is pierced for a corridor entrance, and this is lined
with counters tended by the prettiest Hebes of their
class. Traversing this alley of temptation, you descend
to a marble-paved circular court, tented with
gayly-striped awnings and gorgeous colors of barbaric
architecture. The seats are around a fountain, and a
statue of a water-nymph stands in the centre, holding
above her head a horn, from which issues the water,
in a jet resembling a glass umbrella. The basin is
rimmed with flowers, the falling water makes the constant
murmur which is needful for a tête-à-tête, the sky
looks in through the lacings of the blue and white awning,
and “the ices are made of pure cream.” The
whole scene is more oriental than Spanish, and would
have been better named a serail or a kiosk than the
Alhamra, but it is a “fairy-spot” (as well as a man
can judge who has not seen fairy-land), and, for the
price of an ice-cream, it gives the untravelled a new
idea of luxury.

Great as the difference is between the scents of
moist earth and splashed dust, the latter, faute de
mieux, comes up to your nostrils very agreeably, as
you sit at your summer morning's work in a city window.
It is a day to be thankful for “wet” in almost
any shape. Yet it shows of what accommodating
stuff we are made, when, instead of the gentle ministry
of the exhaling dews, we feel prepared to bless a
fat negro with a leathern pipe, dispensing, as it were,
the city branch of nature's distribution of moisture.
The sable vicegerent of the Croton, whom I have in
my eye (hight Jackson)—now brushing the boots of
Mr. Stopintown, the poor scribbler, now directing at
will the prodigal outgush of water that comes forty
miles to do his bidding—stands, as well he may, petrified
with astonishment at the zealous activity with
which the obedient element follows the turn of his
finger. Negro amazement is evidently taken in at the
mouth. My friendly moistener airs his trachea very
fixedly from the beginning to the end of his easy
function. Thanks to his influence, the thermometer
beside me, I observe, has sunk two degrees with the
tepid abatement of the morning air.

Whatever else may be left unfinished at the end of
the world, we are quite sure that there has been
enough written! The “bow of promise” was no security
against a deluge of books—and it has come!

“Oh, for a perch on Ararat with Noah”—

And, by-the-way, it is a marvel where all these
books go to. We do not mean, of course, the type
and paper. We mean the spirit, black, or white, or
gray, that on this bridge of print passes from the author's
heart into the reader's and there abides—more
difficult to cast out than the devils exiled into pork
three thousand years ago, and still guarded against by
the abhorrent synagogue. Fifteen millions of people,
all ductile, imitative, and plastic—all, at some
moment or other, waiting for a type upon which to
mould their characters—and all supplied, helter-skelter,
at a shilling the pair, with heroes and heroines
made to sell—the creatures God has first created in
his own image, taken soft from his hand, and shaped,
moulded, and finished by De Kock and Bulwer! Who
is there, high or low, that is not reached by these possessing
and enchanting spirits? We are sure we do
not overrate their power. In our own case, a novel of
Bulwer's, read in a day, possesses us exclusively and
irresistibly for a week, and lingers in our brain for
many a day after. Like or dislike the character he
draws—we can not resist the fascination. Yet you
would think the reading of a book, by an editor, would
be like sweeping out the water from a brook. What
must it be to the farmer who reads it by his pine-knot
fire in the country, and thinks of it all day over his
plough—to the apprentice who reads it on Sunday and
ponders on it for a week over his bench. We are only
looking at them as infusions into the fountains of
opinion and impulse; and, if we had time, we should
like to trace them till they appeared in classes of
events, or in features of national character. To do
this in detail would require the space of a lecture or
an essay. But, at a glance—to what do we owe the
fact, that, throughout all the middle and lower classes
of American life, everything except toil and daily
bread is looked at through the most sentimental and
romantic medium? In their notions, affections, and
views of life, the Americans are really the most romantic
people on earth. We do not get this from our
English forefathers—the English are as much the
contrary as is possible. We do not get it from
our pursuits—what can be more unromantic than the
daily cares of an American? We do not get it from
our climate—it is a wonder how romance, fled from
the soft skies of Spain and Italy, can stay among us.
We get it from books—from the hoisting of the floodgates
of copyright—from the inundation of works of
fiction. There are few, we venture to say—few below
the more intellectual classes, whose views of life are
not shaped and modelled, and whose ambitions are not
aimed by characters and impulses found in the

[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]

attractive pages of “cheap literature.” We do not condemn
this, we repeat—we do not know that we would
stop it if we could. At any rate, we prefer it to the
inoculation of English low life—the brutality of the
Jack Sheppard school of novels; and we vastly prefer
it to the voluptuousness of the literature most popular
in France. Thieves are not heroes among us, and
woman is enshrined in respect and honor; and with
these respective differences from England and France,
we can almost rest content under the influences that
make us what we are.

Sit back in your chair, and let me babble! I like
just to pull the spiggot out of my discretion, and let
myself run. No criticisms if you please, and don't
stare! Eyelids down, and stand ready for slip-slop.

I was sitting last night by the lady with the horn
and the glass umbrella, at the Alhamra—I drinking a
julep, she (my companion) eating an ice. The water
dribbled, and the moon looked through the slits in the
awning, and we chatted about Saratoga. My companion
has a very generalizing mind, situated just in
the rear of a very particularly fine pair of black velvet
eyes, and her opinions usually come out by a little
ivory gate with a pink portico—charming gate, charming
portico, charming opinions. I must say I think
more of intellect when it is well lodged.

I am literally at a dead loss to know whether she
said it, or I said it—what my mind runs on at this moment.
It's all one, for if I said it, it was with the velvet
approbation of her ineffable eyes, and before such
eyes I absorb and give back, like the mirror that I am.
These, then, are her reflections about Saratoga.

Why, in mamma's time, it was a different affair.
There was a cabinet of fashion in those days, and the
question was settled with closed doors. Giants have
done being born, and so have super-beautiful women—
such women as used to lay down hearts like blocks in
the wooden pavement, and walk on nothing else.
There were about three in each city—three belles of
whom every baptized person in the country knew the
name, style, and probable number of victims. Their
history should have been written while they lasted—for
of course the gods loved them, and “whom the gods
love die first,” and they are dead, and have left no
manuscripts nor models. Well, these belles were
leagued, and kept up their dynasty by correspondence.
New York was the seat of government, and the next
strongest branch was at Albany (where the women at
one time were lovelier than at any known place and
period since the memory of woman). In New York
alone, however, were married ladies admitted to the
councils. Here and there a renowned beau was kept
in the antechamber for advice. April came, and then
commenced a vigorous exchange of couriers. “The
Springs,” of course, but which? Saratoga, or Lebanon,
or Ballston? What carried it, or who decided it,
was enshrined in the most eternal mystery—but it was
decided and known to a few beaux and the proprietors
of the hotels by the middle of May. Wine and
Johnson's band were provided accordingly. The summer
was more punctual in those days, and July particularly
was seldom belated. After the fourth, the
cabinet started, and then commenced a longitudinal
radiation from north to south—after what, and to follow
whom, was only a secret to the uninitiated. And
such times—for then the people had fortunes, and the
ladies drank champagne! La! how 'ma talks about it!

But now!—Eheu fugaces! (Latin for “bless my
soul”)—change has drank all the spirit of our dream.
There is so much aristocracy in New York that there
is none at all. Beauty has been scrambled for, and
everybody has picked up a little. There must be
valleys to make mountains—ugly people before there
can be belles—but everybody being rather pretty, who
can be divine? Idem, gentility! Who knows who
isn't “genteel” in New York? There are fifty circles
as like as peas—and not even an argument as to the
perihelion. Live where you please, know whom you
please, wear what you please, and ride freely in the
omnibuses, and nobody makes a remark! Social
anarchy!

Why, what a state of things it is when it is as much
trouble to find out where the prettiest people have
gone to pass the summer as it is to inquire out
“good”ness in Wall street! No cherishing, either,
of belle or beau descent! The daughters of the
charming tyrants of ten or twenty years ago, the boys
of the beaux of that time, walk about unpointed at
and degenerate. The “good society” of twenty years
ago is most indifferent society now.

“The vase in which roses have once been distilled”

A great pity they don't have coffee at the Alhamra!
And no curaçoa—and what is ice-cream without a
drop of curaçoa! It's a pretty place—a very pretty
place! And there should be nobody to wait on you
here but dainty and dapper slaves—such as the Moors
had, with golden rings on their ankles, in the veritable
Alhambra. That tall, crooked blackamoor hurts my
eye.

So there was no “Mr. Hicks,” and no “legacy to
Washington Irving.” More's the pity! I wish a
Mr. Hicks might be created impromptu, on purpose.
And more Mr. Hickses for more authors. Birds that
sing should be provided with cages and full cups.
What could be done better with spare moneys than to
take the footworn pilgrim of genius and send him
softly down from the temple of fame shod with velvet!
In every rich man's will there should be at least one
line illuminated with a bequest to genius. Heaven
give us a million that we may set the glorious example!

And now, lady, who are you that in this gossiping
dream has held converse with me! I have murmured
to the black cross, suspended by its braid of hair upon
your throat of ivory, without asking your name—content
that you listened. But now (if spiritual visiters
have arms)—put your arm in mine and come out
under a better-devised ceiling! The night is fragrant.
Heaven is sifting love upon us through the
sieve of the firmament—starlight, you took it for!
And as much falls in Broadway as elsewhere. And
the stars are as sweet, seen from this sidewalk, as they
are from the fountain of Egeria. I have sighed in
both places, and know. “Allons! faites moi l'amour—
car je suis dans mon humeur des Dimanches.”

We are making a study of this big book of a city
we live in. We mean, in good time, to peruse it all—
its blotted passages no less than the lines of it which
fall in pleasant places. And we'll tell you what we
think of it as we go along. Not with shovel and
pickaxe. Order is a law of industry, and industry, as
the child of sin, we virtuously abhor. We shall read
this great book, as we do everything else—in the style
of the antelapsarians—idly and paradise-wise. The
ant and the “little busy bee” were unknown to Adam
and Eve, it may be safely conjectured; and we scorn
to take them for models, as enjoined in the primer.
Butterflies for ever! We shall flit from flower to
flower, and tilt upon any stem that we fancy will support
us—as do these full-dress and faineant gentlemen
of no care. Pray expect nothing in particular!
Stand ready to hop off. Any perfume that comes
down the wind may tempt us to follow its invisible
track back—for so butterflies detect the self-betraying

[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]

flowers of Paradise. (Though, for this zigzagery in
our courses it is, that we butterflies are called volatile
and capricious—as if we had no right, in our own
way, to follow our more spiritual and finer noses!
And to be blamed, too, for imitating, as far as in us
lies, the innocent nothing-to-do-ity of angels!)

But, the animated book of Manhattan. Turn we
to a plain passage, on which we were just now pondering.

There seems to us a poor economy of the animal
spirits in the mode of life of the New-Yorkers. Let
us take a single example, for the convenience of our
over-worked adjectives and pronouns.

Mr. Splitfig, the eminent wholesale grocer, is at the
age of virtue—thirty-five. He rises in the morning
at half-past seven, makes so much of his toilet as appears
above the tablecloth, and makes his breakfast of
the morning paper, a nibble at a roll, and coffee at
discretion. He is too newly up to eat—too recently
arrived from the spiritual land of dreams, as my adorable
friend Lyra would express it. He is grave and
quiet. The sobriety of a fifteen hours' fast is upon
him—for he has not eaten meat since yesterday at
three. Refreshed by sleep, however, and cheerful
after his coffee, he draws on his walking seldom-alluded-tos,
and goes out to be gone till dinner. At eleven,
or thereabout, his spirits begin to flag. He would
rather not see a friend, except on business, for he
hates the trouble of talking. Debts and peecadilloes
lie at the bottom of the stomach, and his heart drops
down to them for want of a betweenity of beefsteak.
He begins to be faintish, but he is principled against
lunching or drinking before dinner, and by one o'clock
his animal spirits have sunk into his boots, and, from
that time till three, he is a dispirited fag, going through
with his habitual routine of business, but, of a civil
word or a smile as incapable as Caliban. It is while
the chambers of his head are thus unlighted and untenanted,
however, that the most of his friends and
acquaintances see him and judge of his capacity for
entertainment. He speaks to fifty people in the
course of those two exhausted hours, and speaks sullenly
and coldly, and, of these fifty, not one considers
that

“The very road into his kindness”

But, at three, Mr. Splitfig dines—and as he gives
them something to stand on, his spirits jump up and
look out of his eyes. His tongue feels the moisture
at its root, and grows flowery, and the one man who
sits opposite to the unctuous grocer at table thinks
him the best of fellows.

Splitfig keeps a trotter, and, after dinner, happy and
agreeable, he jumps into his wagon, and distributes,
along the milestones and hedges of the Bloomingdale
road, smiles and good-natured glances, that were much
more wisely got up four hours earlier in the day, and
sown among his friends for a crop of popularity. To
change the similitude, Splitfig makes his day's voyage
with a cold boiler, and gets up the steam on arriving
at the wharf!

Not so Monsieur Toutavous, the French importer.
Toutavous takes a cup of coffee at waking, and on
the strength of it, dresses, reads the papers, and writes
the two or three business-letters which require the
coolest head. He keeps for his own society exclu
sively the melancholy hour or two of every day, during
which “the stomach is apprehensive that the
throat is cut”—the communication is so interrupted.
Yet as these unsmiling hours are excellent for
thought and calculation, he so shapes his business
that he can pass them, alone, without inconvenience.
He has taken his coffee, observe, but he has not breakfasted.
At eleven he goes to Delmonico's on his way
to the “shop.” A beefsteak and a pint of claret dress
his countenance in smiles, and invigorate his fingers
for the friendly clasp exacted by courtesy. He gets to
his counting-house a little before twelve, enters upon
the hard work of the day with a system alert and lively,
and impresses everybody whom he sees with the idea
that he is born to good fortune, and has the look of
it, and is a good fellow, with no distrust of his credit
nor of himself. Sensible of Toutavous—is it not?

Pity, we say again, that the personal, physical economies
are so little regarded among us. The ladies
lack also a little “fernseed in their ears,” but we
would not put them off with the tail of a paragraph.
We have, for them, a chapter in lavender; not of our
own devising altogether! A superb female Machiavel
whom we once knew, who came always to a ball
at three in the morning, fresh as a rosebud after a
night's sleep, entrancing you with her dewy coolness
when everybody else was hot and weary—she, capable
of this brilliant absurdity, once discoursed to us
on the economies of heart-breaking. We will show
you the trick some day. Meantime, salaam!

“As much good stay with thee as go with me!”

The first visiter to the bay of New York, and the
writer of the first description on record, was John
de Verrazzano, a Florentine, in the service of Francis
the First. This bold navigator had been for some
time in command of four ships, crusing against the
Spaniards. But his little fleet being separated in a
storm, Verrazzano determined, with one of them, the
Dauphin, to take a voyage in search of new countries.
He arrived on the American coast, somewhere near
North Carolina, and first proceeded south as far as
“the region of palm-trees,” probably Florida. He
then turned, and proceeded north till he entered a
harbor, which he describes thus, in a passage of a letter
addressed by him to his royal master:—

“This land is situated in the paralele of Rome, in
forty-one degrees and two terces; but somewhat more
colde by accidentall causes. The mouth of the haven
lieth open to the south, half a league broad; and
being entred within it, between the east and the north,
it stretcheth twelve leagues, where it wareth broader
and broader, and maketh a gulfe about twenty leagues
in compass, wherein are five small islands, very fruitfull
and pleasant, full of hie and broad trees, among
the which islands any great navie may ride without
any feare of tempest or other danger.”

In this harbor Verrazzano appears to have remained
about fifteen days. He and his men frequently went
on shore to obtain supplies and see the country. He
says, in another part of his letter: “Sometimes our
men stayed two or three daies on a little island neere
the ship for divers necessaries. We were oftentimes
within the land five or six leagues, which we found as
pleasant as is possible to declare, very apt for any
kind of husbandry, of corne, wine, and ayle. We
entered afterward into the woods, which we found so
thicke that any army, were it never so great, might
have hid itself therein; the trees whereof are okes,
cypress-trees, and other sorts unknown in Europe.”

These were probably the first European feet that
ever trod on any part of the territory now included in
the state of New York. Verrazzano and his crew

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

seem to have had considerable intercourse with the
natives, and generally to have been treated well,
though by his own account he did not always deserve
it. Speaking of an excursion made by his men somewhere
on the coast, he says: “They saw only one
old woman, with a young maid of eighteen or twenty
yeeres old, which, seeing our companie, hid themselves
in the grasse for feare. The old woman carried
two infants on her shoulders, and the young
woman was laden with as many. As soon as they
saw us, to quiet them and win their favors, our men
gave them victuals to eate, which the old woman received
thankfully, but the young woman threw them
disdainfully on the ground. They took a child from
the old woman to bring into France; and going about
to take the young woman, which was very beautiful,
and of tall stature, they could not possibly, for the
great outcries that she made, bring her to the sea;
and especially having great woods to pass thorow, and
being far from the ship, we proposed to leave her behind,
bearing away the child only.”

In a subsequent part of this narrative, Verrazzano
presents a very favorable picture, not only of the amenity,
but of the discretion of the aborigines: “They
came in great companies of their small boats unto the
ship, with their faces all bepainted with divers colors,
and bringing their wives with them, whereof they
were very jealous; they themselves entering aboard
the ship, and staying there a good space, but causing
their wives to stay in their boats; and for all the entreatie
that we could make, offering to give them divers
things, we could never obtaine that they would
suffer them to come aboard the ship. And oftentimes
one of the two kings coming with his queene, and
many gentlemen for their pleasure to see us, they all
stayed on shore, two hundred paces from us, sending
us a small boat to give us intelligence of their coming;
and as soon as they had answere from us they
came immediately, and wondered at hearing the cries
and noyses of the mariners. The queene and her
maids stayed in a very light boat at an island a quarter
of a league off, while the king abode a long space in
our ship, uttering divers conceits with gestures, viewing
with great admiration the furniture of the shippe.
And sometimes our men staying one or two days on
a little island near the ship, he returned with seven or
eight of his gentlemen to see what we did; then the
king drawing his bow, and running up and down with
his gentlemen, made much sport to gratify our men.”

The sail-studded bay of New York at this day presents
another scene; and one of these same “gentlemen”
is now almost as great a curiosity here as was
John de Verrazzano, only three centuries ago, to the
rightful lords of this fair land and water.

If we are not “qualifying” for the doom of Sodom
and Gomorrah, we must look elsewhere for the causes
of the accelerated pace at which goes on our national
demoralization. How many pegs down we have
dropped within three or four years, in political principle,
how many in mercantile honor and credit, how
many in the demand and consequent quality of literature,
and how many in the dignity of the periodical
press, are four very pregnant texts for sermons, as
well as questions for political economy. But more
striking than any of these changes for the worse,
seems to us the demoralization of private life—the
increase of scenes of bloodshed, of shocking immorralities,
of violence toward the unprotected, of calumnies,
revenges, sabbath-breakings, and all the abominations
common to more corrupt and older countries.
When is this unnaturally rapid tide to ebb, and to
what is it tending?

In the comparative idleness of Americans at present—
the stagnation of business and the food for bad
passions, which always lies under misfortune and desperation—
we may doubtless find the immediate causes
of these evil changes, and in this there lies a hope,
that, with the country's reviving prosperity and industry,
its morals, public and private, will mend. But
there are other and more permanent principles of evil
at work among us, which will grow with our growth
and strengthen with our strength—as they have grown
and strengthened with the progress and prosperity of
every country under the sun. In a most philosophical
and able letter on the condition of the different
countries of Europe, which appeared lately in the
National Intelligencer, the writer (President Durbin)
remarks upon the gradual diminution of the middle
classes in England, and the “widening separation between
the rich, who are becoming richer, and the
poor, who are becoming poorer.” This middle class—
which is the population without its extremes of aristocracy
and beggary—constitutes the body and
strength of England, and when its wealth has been
drawn to the aristocracy, and its wants to the beggary
of that country, she will be ready for the next stages
of national history—revolution and downfall. America,
however, has as yet neither extreme to any considerable
extent. Our population are almost entirely
persons of such means and pursuits as would place
them within the pale of the middle class in England.
There is no well-defined aristocracy—no inevitable
and irremediable beggary. But the tendency is toward
these extremes, and in that tendency—irritated
and strengthened just now by the peculiar prostration
of “the times”—we see the causes of no small portion
of the evils we have alluded to. The first step
taken toward the formation of an aristocracy is the
adoption of its vices, as the first result of inevitable
or impending beggary is the contemplation of crime.
The refined pursuits of a man born to a certainty of
wealth and station, can not be adopted in a moment,
nor can suffice for the desires of a man suddenly
grown rich. Nor are the higher pleasures of taste
and intellect at all satisfying, except after a youth of
high culture and ennobled association. The result is,
that the corrupted or vacant mind of the fortunate
possessor of wealth turns to the pursuit of pleasure,
and pleasure in such minds soon degenerates into vice.
A virtuous aristocracy, if it ever exist at all, is the
slow creation of pride of ancestry, and a well-instilled
conviction of the true path of distinction and honor—
but meantime the beginners at luxury and power are
established as a class of ostentatious and unprincipled
members of society, and the license and indulgence
they exact is yielded them with exasperation on the
part of those they displace and injure. Seduction
and intrigue, hushed up, winked at, paid for with
money, in European countries, is here resented with
the murder of the offender. Public opinion, which,
in Europe, under such circumstances, would forgive
the offence, and sympathise only with the seducer,
takes, in this country, as yet, the other side. To be
idle, which was formerly a reproach, is becoming a
merit here, as it is in countries where none are gentlemen
but the idle. But gambling by night for the
means of extravagant idleness takes the place of industry
by day, and the heart-burnings, jealousies, and
unemployed passions of this class, lead almost certainly
to scenes of violence and bloodshed. The
presence in our community of a large body of idlers
(such as exists in all the countries of Europe), whose
whole occupation in life is profligacy, is an evil very
fast coming upon this country, and one which should
at least be guarded against by a total change in the
education and guardianship of women.

If you have never been on the Beacon course at
Hoboken, you have never seen the opening lips of
the Hudson river to advantage. As if nature was of

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

the same opinion, the long city, with the dot of Governor's
island below it, looks like a note of admiration
jotted down on the other side. This high table
of land in so near neighborhood to New York is a superb
natural esplanade, and I marvel much that such
unequalled sites for villas can be monopolized by a
rececourse. I will spare you the “fine writing” with
which the view inspired me while there. It cools too
rosy for prose.

I went over in the suite of a choice “Spirit of the
Times,” to see the great match between saddle and
wheels—the Oneida Chief, a pacer in harness, against
Lady Suffolk and Beppo, two trotters, under jockeys
in stirrups. It was rather a new mode of racing—
new to me, at least—and I expected a great crowd,
but the spectators were in scores instead of thousands.
On the way, and in the stand, I was amused with the
physiognomy and phraseology of the persons drawn
from the city by the sporting nucleus. There was a
sprinkling of nobodies, like myself, of course, and
some strangers from the hotels; but the remainder
had a peculiarity which marked them as a class, and
at which I can only fling a conjecture in the way of a
definition. Every sense and faculty about them
seemed abandoned to jollity, except the eye. The
eye looked cool and unsympathetic. In the heartiest
laugh, the lids did not relax. The sharp scrutinizing
wrinkle and the brow pressed down, remained immovable
while the sides were shaking. I am not sure
that the whole expression lay in this; but there was
an expression, very decided, about them of a reservation
from fun somewhere, and, with all their frolic and
nonsense, they looked as cool and ready as a slate
and pencil. Sharp boys, I should take them to be,
seen singly anywhere.

The horses were breathed a little before the race,
and as they went to and fro before the stand, I had a
fair look at them. Lady Suffolk has all the showiness
of the trio, and she looks more like a narrow escape
of beauty than beauty itself. She is a large dappled
gray mare, with a tail fit for a pacha's standard,
legs not particularly blood-like, stiff walking gait, and
falls off behind and slopes under the hamstrings like a
corn-crib built to shed rain. Cover her head up
(which looks knowing enough for a Wall street broker's),
and she would not sell, standing still at a country
market, for a hundred dollars. A little study of
her structure, however, shows you that she is made
for something or other very extraordinary, and when
she starts from you with a rider on her back, she goes
off like something entirely different from any velocity
of leg that you are acquainted with. The speed of
two passing steamers going at twenty miles an hour—
you on one and a horse on the deck of the other—
would give you the same sensation of unnatural goaway-ness.
Seen coming, from a little distance, she
rocks like a pendulum swinging from the rider's head,
and when she goes by at full speed, a more pokerish,
awkward, and supernatual gait could scarce be
got out of a cross between a steam-paddle and an
ostrich. Every time her haunches draw up, she
shoots ahead as if she was hit behind with an invisible
beetle. Nothing in the way of legs seems to
explain it.

The Oneida Chief is not half so fine an animal
to look at as his driver, Hiram Woodruff, the great
whip of the turf. He is as fine a specimen of the
open-air man, born for a field open to all comers, as I
have met with in my life. He has a fine frank countenance,
a step like a leopard, a bold eye, and a most
compact, symmetrical, and elastic frame, fit for a
gladiator. In his sulky, he looked as all riders in
those ugly contrivances do, like an animal with an
axletree through him, and wheels to his hips, but he
drove so beautifully as to abate the usual ridicule of
the vehicle. The Oneida Chief is a sorrel, and a
wonderful pacer, but, as he was beaten, I will say no
more about him.

Beppo, the second best horse, is the most comical
little animal I have ever seen. His color is like a
shabby brown plush, and he looks, at a first glance, as
if he might have been a cab-horse, or a baker's horse,
or in some other much-abused line, but retaining,
withal, a sort of cocked-pistol expression of eye and
limb, and a most catgut extension of muscle. His
loins are like a greyhound, and every hair on him seems
laid in the most economical way to go, and when he
does go there is no outlay for any other purpose. A
more mere piece of straightforward work than Beppo's
action I could never imagine. Whatever balk there
was in starting, he was just at the mark, and he neither
broke nor bothered, but did it all in round honest
trotting, coming up on the last quarter stretch like a
whipped-up arrow. As he only lost the first heat by
a head, he of course did his mile, as Lady Suffolk
did, in two minutes twenty-six seconds—the fastest
trotting on record.

“How d'ye do!—how d'ye do!” as greetings, have
passed away. Those two never-answered interrogatories
have yielded to the equally meaning salutations,
“Eh, back!” “Where?” In your autumn trip to
the city remember to salute your friends and acquaintances.
For some three weeks this has been the
vogue, and (grown a gravity with use) people now
shake hands over “Eh back!” “Where?” with all
the sober earnestness which attended the habitual
“how d'ye do?” “how d'ye do?” I give it you by
way of early report of the prevailing fashion.

Since I wrote to you I have aired my magnetic
circle with a trip into the solitude of the Highlands.
“Retiring from the crowd” is an impoverished phrase
for the withdrawal of one's ten thousand spiritual feelers
from the interlaced contact and influence of four
hundred thousand neighbors. We can get used to
anything—thanks to the adaptability of our natures—
and my four hundred thousandth part of the space,
light, air, and locomotion of the island of Manhattan,
had grown by habit to be a comfortable allowance;
but it was no less a relief to send up my breath to the
sky without mixture, and to look about without tangling
my retina with the optic nerves of other people.
The ordinary accompaniments of departure from
town give the fullest effect to the contrast. The pellet
of potato, crowded into the quill of a boy's popgun,
does not escape with a more sudden relief than
the passenger departing by the North river steamer.
The crowd grows closer and tighter as you get to the
wharf, and the last five minutes before casting off are
as close a pressure of flesh, blood, and personal atmosphere,
as can well be endured with any prospect of
recovered elasticity. Suddenly there is a rush ashore,
and you shoot out into the calm and open bay, and
dropping into a chair, instantly commence the perusal
of a rural shore, gliding stilly athwart your eye like
the lines of a pastoral poem:—no people between you
and it, no eyes looking at you from the Palisades, no
hats on the trees, no bows from the ripples as you pass,
no jostle in the fresh air, no greeting, no beggar, no
bore. As a sudden release of mind and body from a
tight place, I know nothing (short of death at the
Five Points) to exceed it.

I was on board “the Swallow,” the stillest skimmer
of the waters in which I have yet travelled, and I trust
the green trees, and indented bays, nooks, and knolls
of Hoboken and Westchester, were sensible of the
fresh intensity of my admiration, as we glided, dreamlike
and un-steamer-like, by. I made one or two
mundane and gregarious observations, by-the-by, on
the voyage, and the principal one was the watchful
and delicate attention of the captain of the boat to the

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

comfort of the ladies and children on board, and,
apropos of that, the superiority of this class in our
country over those of every other. I could wish the
foreign travellers among us might take our steamboat
captains on the Hudson as specimens of our habits
and manners, and, for the three whom I have the
pleasure to know (the captains of the Troy, Swallow,
and Empire), I am quite sure that no gentleman could
desire, for wife or daughter, more courteous and well-bred
care than they habitually bestow on the passengers
who embark with them. As an instance (which
I noticed and think worth recording), Captain McLean
chanced to discover, at the moment a lady was going
ashore with a child and a nurse at nine o'clock at
night, that her destination was on the other side of the
river, near a landing where the boats do not regularly
touch. As it looked like rain, and she was to cross in
a row-boat, he stopped the baggage on the plank,
begged her to be seated for a few minutes, and ran
“The Swallow” across, landing her almost at her
own door, very much to her delight and relief. It
should be set down in his honor, and long may devotion
to women be, as it certainly is now, a national
and peculiar feature of the Americans.

When I stated to you that Mr. Morse would probably
be the biographer of Allston, I had for the moment
forgotten that the great artist married a sister of
Richard Dana, who, by every claim and qualification,
is, of course, the proper person to undertake it. I
trust it will not be a “cold abstraction.” It is true,
the personal and familiar character of all men of genius
will not bear posthumous unveiling—but Allston's
will. He was, in the phraseology of the old
dramatists, “a sweet gentleman.” God never wove
the woof and warp of taste, feeling, and intellect, under
a more clear and transparent surface than in the
“Paint King” of our country. You read his mind
first, in seeing him. His frame was but the net that
held it in. Everybody loved him. Everybody did
homage to him—as a man no less than as an artist.
Mr. Dana would write for his family circle the kind of
memoir we want for the world. He lives in an atmosphere
of cold, un-cosmopolite, provincial observance,
in Boston, and I am afraid his book will smack of the
place and climate. I wish he would go to Florence
and write it—off, among the artists, at a proper perspective
distance, and with his blood warmed up with
the climate and his kinsman's far-off praises. The
biography of Allston should embrace the history of
the first cycle of American art—from the beginning
to Allston's death. It is truly a rare chance for a
model biography, and Dana has it in him—minus
fusion. But he will think “the schoolmaster is
abroad,” and I will say no more.

If you are not particularly acquainted with us, dear
reader, pray consider this last page in the light of a
private letter—inviolable if not addressed simply to
yourself. We have tried to convey this for some
weeks past by caption—as “More Particularly,”
“Confidentially,” “Just you and I,” etc., etc.—but
with no apparent success. We are evidently read.
Our private slip-slop, twaddled under the secrecy
of this page en dishabille, comes back to us, commented
on with full-dress criticism by the pastoral
editors. Now (courage, while we administer a
slice of the dictionary!) our idiosyncracy is a passion
for individual proximity. We would fain be familiar—
with one at a time. We write and compile
fifteen mortal pages, addressed to the universe. We
know by education that it is proper to do so. The
snail comes out occasionally from his suitable house,
and walks in the open globe. But we are a-cold out
of our privacy. We want something between us and
the promiscuous points of compass. We yearn to be
personal and particular—tête-à-tête. And on this sixteenth
page we indulge our little weakness. If you
do not love us—you that have turned over this leaf—
pardon us, but you intrude!

If there be a time for all things, there is a time to
cease to be gregarious. To measure age by years is
to weigh gems against paving-stones—but there is a
point in middle age—(from thirty to fifty, as you wear)—
when the card-case should be burnt in solemn holocaust.
For acquaintances you have no more time.
The remainder of life is little enough for friends, and,
between friends, pasteboard is superfluous. We have
ripened to that point—we! In our pyramid of life
the base was broad and sympathetic. We spread
ourselves as far as we could reach—but with the rise
of the pyramid of years the outer edges have dropped
away, and the planes have lessened. We are limited
to friends, now. Our mind runs friendship-wise. We
tu-toi, as the French say. We like to chat familiarly—
with the world shut out—indulged and slip-shod.

We have knocked our head against this corner of
speculation, while making threescore or more bows of
acknowledgment to editors kind and complimentary.
Somebody loves us, there is no doubt. We are
wished well in our vocation. And that is much in
a world where it is so difficult to butter the dry crust
of industry. But, with no design to annoy or rebuke
us, there is a leaning, in these friendly notices, to find
fault with our frivolity. We are too frisky for breakfast
reading. “The spirits of the wise sit in the
clouds and mock us.” And for this we are sorry.

That the following (from the New Bedford Bulletin)
was written by a man who loves us, nobody will
doubt—yet see the word we have underlined!—

“The New Mirror for last week is an exquisite number.
Willis has scattered his gems of humor, wit, and puppyism,
all over it, making it odorous and sparkling as a fountain
playing rose-water. Willis is the best American prose-writer
of a certain class now living. He is as delicious as Tom
Moore, and a great deal more decent.”

Now, what is “puppyism?” That it is “odorous,”
we may venture to take upon our friend's authority.
But, if “sparkling as a fountain playing rose-water,”
Heaven bless the puppy-most, still say we! Would
you have us graver? Is there not gravity enough in
the world that you can forego our little contribution?
Have you no funerals, no false friends, no leaden politics,
and no notes to pay—that you must come for our
gravity to eke you out? Or do you find fault with
our dabble in the superfineries? Is that it? Mustn't
we mention “patent leather” and “velvet eyes?”
Can't we call the mouth of a charming woman a
“pink portico with an ivory door”—without offending
you? Come, come, you are not quite the anchorite
you would label yourself, and, while flowers will
bloom, hortus siccus be hanged—say you not so? Let
us talk about the things we like. Life is too short for
hypocrisy. Try the trick yourself. Write a paragraph
or two in our flummery way, and see how trippingly
it comes off, and what an uncoiling from your
heart it is of the dull serpent of care!

Put this French proverb in your pipe and smoke it—
“Ne pouvoir tolerer les faiblesses d'autrui, voila la
faiblesse.” If you never thought of that, thank us
for a new precept, and slip a copy of it under your
friendships. It keeps out moths like camphor.

Not quite one hundred years after Verrazzano's discovery
of the bay of New York, during all which
period we have no account of its having been visited
by a European vessel, Hudson made the capes of
Virginia on his third cruise in search of the northwest

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

passage. Standing still on a northward course, he
arrived in sight of the Narrows, distinguishing from a
great distance the highlands of Neversink, which his
mate, Robert Juet, described in the journal he kept as
a “very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to
see.”

The most interesting peculiarity of our country to
a European observer, is the freshness of its early history,
and the strong contrast it presents of most of the
features of a highly-civilized land, with the youth and
recent adventures of a newly-discovered one. The
details of these first discoveries are becoming every
day more interesting; and that part of the journal of
the great navigator which relates to his first view of
them is very interesting. The following extracts describe
the Narrows as they were two hundred years ago:

“At three of the clock in the afternoone we came
to three great rivers. So we stood along to the northernmost,
thinking to have gone into it, but we found
it to have a very shoald barre before it, for we had but
ten foot water. Then we cast about to the southward,
and found two fathoms, three fathoms, and three and
a quarter, till we came to the souther side of them,
then we had five or six fathoms, and anchored. So we
sent in our boat to sound, and they found no less water
than foure, five, six, and seven fathoms, and returned
in an hour and a halfe. So we weighed and went in,
and rode in five fathoms, ose ground, and saw many
salmons, and mullets, and rayes, very great.

“The fourth, in the morning, as soone as the day
was light, we saw that it was good riding farther up.
So we went our boate to sound, and found that it was a
very good harbour; then we weighed and went in with
our ship. Then our boat went on land with our net
to fish, and caught ten great mullets, of a foot and a
half long apeece, and a ray as great as foure men could
hale into the ship. So we trimmed our boat, and
rode still all day. At night the wind blew hard at the
northwest and our anchor came home, and we drove
on shore, but took no hurt, thanked bee God, for the
ground is soft sand and ose. This day the people of
the country came aboard of us, seeming very glad of
our comming, and brought greene tobacco, and gave
us of it for knives and beads. They go in deere
skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper.
They desire cloathes, and are very civill. They have
great store of maise, or Indian wheate, whereof they
make good bread. The country is full of great and
tall oaks.

“The fifth, in the morning, as soone as the day was
light, the wind ceased; so we sent our boate in to
sound the bay. Our men went on land there and saw
great store of men, women, and children, who gave
them tobacco at their coming on land. So they went
up into the woods, and saw great store of very goodly
oakes, and some currants.

“The sixth, in the morning, was faire weather, and
our master sent John Colman with foure other men in
our boat over to the north side, to sound the other
river” (the Narrows). “They found very good riding
for ships, and a narrow river to the westward” (probably
what is now called the Kills, or the passage between
Bergen Neck and Staten Island), “between two
islands. The lands, they told us, were as pleasant,
with grasse and flowers, and goodly trees, as they ever
had seen, and very sweet smells came from them. So
they went in two leagues and saw an open sea, and
returned; and as they came backe they were set upon
by two canoes, the one having twelve, the other fourteen
men. The night came on, and it began to raine,
so that their match went out; and they had one man
slain in the fight, which was an Englishman, named
John Colman, with an arrow shot into his throat, and
two more hurt. It grew so dark that they could not
find the shippe that night, but laboured to and fro on
their oares.

“The seventh was fair, and they returned aboard
the ship, and brought our dead man with them, whom
we carried on land and buried.”

On the eighth, Hudson lay still, to be more sure of
the disposition of the natives before venturing farther
in. Several came on board, but no disturbance occurred,
and on the ninth he got under weigh, passed
the Narrows, and proceeded by slow degrees up the
river destined to bear his name.

The current of life seems to be too rapid in America
to allow time for reflection upon anything which
can possibly be deferred. The monuments are left
unfinished on our battle-field; the tombs of great men
become indistinguishable before marked with a stone;
and the sacred places where patriotism has dwelt, are
rated by the value of their material, and left to decay.
It is difficult to visit Mount Vernon, and feel, from
any mark of care or respect visible about it, that
America owes anything to the sacred ashes it entombs.

The family tomb at Mount Vernon has once been
robbed by a sacrilegious ruffian, whose ignorance
alone preserved for us the remains of Washington. It
has been proposed to Congress to buy Mount Vernon,
and establish a guard over relics so hallowed. Why
should not this be done, and a sufficient sum be appropriated
to enclose and keep in order the whole
estate, improve the execrable road leading to it from
Alexandria, and employ persons to conduct strangers
over the place?

The vault in which the ashes of Washington repose,
is at the distance of, perhaps, thirty rods from
the house, immediately upon the bank of the river.
A more romantic and picturesque site for a tomb can
scarcely be imagined. Between it and the Potomac
is a curtain of forest-trees, covering the steep declivity
to the water's edge, breaking the glare of the prospect,
and yet affording glimpses, of the river, where
the foliage is thickest. The tomb is surrounded by
several large native oaks, which are venerable by their
years, and which annually strew the sepulchre with
autumnal leaves, furnishing the most appropriate drapery
for the place, and giving a still deeper impression
to the memento mori. Interspersed among the oaks,
and overhanging the tomb, is a copse of red cedar,
whose evergreen boughs present a fine contrast to the
hoary and leafless branches of the oak; and while the
deciduous foliage of the latter indicates the decay of
the body, the eternal verdure of the former furnishes
a fitting emblem of the immortal spirit. The sacred
and symbolic cassia was familiar to Washington, and,
perhaps, led to the selection of a spot where the ever-green
flourished.

One of the most interesting associations with the
tomb of Washington, is Lafayette's visit to it, as
related by Levasseur:—

“After a voyage of two hours, the guns of Fort
Washington announced that we were approaching the
last abode of the father of his country. At this
solemn signal, to which the military band accompanying
us responded by plaintive strains, we went on
deck, and the venerable soil of Mount Vernon was before
us. At this view an involuntary and spontaneous
movement made us kneel. We landed in boats, and
trod upon the ground so often trod by the feet of
Washington. A carriage received General Lafayette;
and the other visiters silently ascended the precipitous
path which conducted to the solitary habitation of
Mount Vernon. In re-entering beneath this hospitable
roof, which had sheltered him when the reign of
terror tore him violently from his country and family,
George Lafayette felt his heart sink within him, at no
more finding him whose paternal care had softened his
misfortunes; while his father sought with emotion for
everything which reminded him of the companion of
his glorious toils.

“Three nephews of General Washington took

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

Lafayette, his son, and myself, to conduct us to the tomb
of their uncle; our numerous companions remained
in the house. In a few minutes the cannon, thundering
anew, announced that Lafayette rendered homage
to the ashes of Washington. Simple and modest as
he was during life, the tomb of the citizen hero is
scarcely perceived among the sombre cypresses by
which it is surrounded. A vault, slightly elevated and
dotted over—a wooden door without inscriptions—
some withered and green garlands, indicate to the traveller
who visits the spot where rest in peace the puissant
arms which broke the chains of his country. As
we approached, the door was opened. Lafayette descended
alone into the vault, and a few minutes after
reappeared, with his eyes overflowing with tears. He
took his son and me by the hand, and led us into the
tomb, where, by a sign, he indicated the coffin. We
knelt reverentially, and rising, threw ourselves into
the arms of Lafayette, and mingled our tears with
his.”

There are manifest signs that the summer is here.
The ladies who are on their travels, and the ladies who
are not, wear alike the toilet of transit—dust-proof
dresses and green veils. “Bound for the Springs” is
palpably intended to be expressed by every apparition
of beauty in Broadway. The gentlemen, in the absence
of the more approved targets at which their
irresistiblenesses are aimed, go about in calico coats,
ungloved, unwaistcoated, unstrapped, and uncravatted.
Hot corn is cried at midnight. Raspberries are
treacherous. Green apples and pears grace the tables
of the hucksters. The daily papers show signs of the
rustication of the leading editors. Hotels crammed,
and a pervading odor of the fruity drinks extending a
hundred yards from them in every direction. The
summer has arrived, I believe—but I feel called upon
to admit that count D'Orsay and Lady Blessington
have not. Colonel Stone's virtuous horrification at
the mention of such improper people by your correspondent
has probably driven them into an incognitude
which has cost the count his whiskers, at least. Without
them, Niagara itself would not recognise him—
brother wonder as he is—and, if in the land of Bozworship
at all, they probably pass for a big Kentuckian
and his handsome mother. Keep a look out as
you travel, however, amis voyageurs!

Kissing has no longer the drawback of wear and
tear. I see that Dr. Ellsworth of Hartford has succeeded
in restoring a lost upper lip. The paper
which describes it says: “Upon the red facing may
possibly be detected the point of connexion between
the two halves. The lip is really a handsome
one—quite equal to the best cures of hare-lip. No
one would for a moment suspect that it had travelled
from the cheeks to its present location, which it
graces as well as the original, except that it has not
quite as free and easy a motion, although enough for
all common purposes.”

Passengers up the Hudson who wish to take the
early trains west, embark at present on the forward
deck of the “Empire.” Those who are not in a
hurry take passage in the after cabin, and on the
mooring of the boat at Albany, pay their respects to
the ex-president at Kinderhook, from the stern taffrail.
She is commanded by Captain Roe, who, in the extent
of his jurisdiction, ranks with the governor of Rhode
Island, and is a potentate to be propitiated in politics.
Seriously, this noble steamer is a very great curiosity.
The saloon on her promenade deck is nearly three
hundred feet long, and, with four or five hundred people
on board, she seems to have few passengers. The
sight of her engine at work is an imposing affair.
Some of the state-rooms above are small drawing-rooms
to accommodate parties, and she is furnished
and managed with a luxury and tact worth making a
trip to see.

I understand it has lately occurred to some gentlemen
with open eyes, that anchorage is cheaper than
ground-rent—that a ship-of-war is but a spacious
hotel upside-down, and that the most desirable site for
a summer residence, as to pure air, neighborhood,
novelty, and economy, is now occupied by the “Independence”
and “North Carolina,” the men-of-war
just off the Battery. The latter ship being unseaworthy,
it is proposed to purchase her of the government
for the experiment. It is estimated that she can
accommodate comfortably three hundred persons. The
immense upper-deck is to be covered with a weather-proof
awning, blue and white, in the style of the Alhamra,
and given up entirely to dining, dancing,
lounging, and the other uses of hotel drawing-rooms.
A more magnificent promenade than this immense
deck, cleared of guns and lumber fore-and-aft, and
surrounded entirely by luxurious sofas, could scarcely
be imagined. The kitchens and offices are to occupy
the forward part of the second deck, or, if the vessel
is crowded, to be transferred to a small tender alongside.
The port-holes are to be enlarged to spacious
windows, and the two decks below, which are above
the water-line, will be entirely occupied by splendid
rooms, open to the entire breadth of the bay, and furnished
in the oriental and cushioned style, suitable to
the luxurious wants of hot weather. Minute-barges
will ply to and from the shore, connected with the
Waverley line of omnibuses; bath-houses will be
anchored just astern; a café and ice-cream shop will
be established in the main and mizen-tops (to be
reached by a covered staircase); and sofas, for the
accommodation of smokers, will be put under a pent-house
roof, outside the vessel, in the main-chains.
The cockpit and hold will of course unite the uses of
a hotel-garret and cellar. It will have the advantage
of other hotels, in swinging round with the tide, so
that the lodgers on both sides of the ship will see, by
turns, from the windows, the entire panorama of the bay.
When lightened of her guns, and her upper spars and
rigging, it is thought she will float so much higher as
to bear piercing for another line of port-hole windows,
affording some bachelor's rooms at the water-line, corresponding
in price and convenience with the sky-chambers
of the Astor. An eccentric individual, I
am told, has bargained for a private parlor, to be suspended
under the bowsprit, in imitation of the nest of
the hanging-bird. Altogether, the scheme seems
charming and feasible. The name of the hotel, by-the-way,
is to be “Saratoga Afloat;” the waiters are
to be dressed in the becoming toggery of tars; and
the keeper of the house is to wear a folded napkin,
epaulet fashion, on either shoulder, and to be called
invariably “commodore.”

This seems to be the age of invention. Several
houses in the city are being made rather higher, by
raising them ten feet on screws, and building a story
under them—a great economy of the loins of hod-carriers.

As a metropolis of wealth and fashion, New York
has one great deficiency—that of a driving park.
Rome has its Pincian Hill, Florence its Cascine,
Paris its Bois de Bologne, and London its Hyde Park;
and most other capitals have places of resort-on-wheels,
where fresh air and congenial society may
be met in the afternoon hours. Such a place is
only not considered indispensable in New York, because
it has never been enjoyed. It is, for the rich,
the highest of luxuries. The Cascine of Florence,

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

for example, is a park of two miles square, laid out in
wooded avenues; and to its winding roads and forest
glades resort, every afternoon, the entire equipaged
population of the court and city. At sunset, the carriages
meet in an open square in the centre, and the
“lords and ladies” pass the two hours of the delicious
twilight in visiting from vehicle to vehicle, forming
parties for the evening, flirting, making acquaintances,
talking scandal, and other dainty diversions—breaking
up in time to go to the opera or dress for a ball. There
is enough room for such a park in the neighborhood
of Union square, or on the East or North river; and
the importance of such spaces, left open for lungs to
a crowded city, has been long inculcated by physicians.
I think it possible such an exclusive resort might be at
first a little unpopular (remembering that some three
years ago a millionaire was stoned for riding through
Broadway with a mounted servant in livery behind
him), but, as one of the hand-to-mouth class, I do
not care how soon the rich get richer and the poor
poorer—leaving a comfortable middle class, in which
ambition might stop to breathe.

I notice the introduction of the Italian verandah
curtains to New York—the sort of striped demi-umbrella,
put out from the top of the window with falling
side folds, which are so common in Venice and Naples.
Two or three shops in Broadway have them,
and Cozzens has lately fitted them on to the windows
of his ladies' dining-room—and most showy and picturesque
luxuries they are.

Howard has chosen, for the decoy of his hotel, an
intermittent relay of governors. The immense flag
which sweeps the top of the omnibuses in Broadway
on the arrival of such functionaries, seems to have no
sinecure of it, and his house is, in consequence, continually
overrun. He keeps a table suitable to a court
hotel, and seems to be the only one of his class who
is independent of “travelling seasons.”

I observe that the paviors are at work in the upper
part of Broadway, removing the wooden pavement,
and substituting the broad, flat stones, such as are laid
in the streets of Florence. The wooden blocks were
certainly in a deplorable condition, but I do not think
they have had fair play as an experiment. They were
badly laid, and were left to annoy the public long after
they should have been repaired.

A periodical journal in Boston gives the name and
true history of Tom Thumb, the dwarf now at the
Museum. He was christened Charles Stratton. His
parents were of the usual size, and he has two sisters
of the usual proportions. General Thumb has not
grown since he was six months old, and he is now
eleven, and twenty-two inches tall. He is perfectly
formed, very athletic for his size, and in perfect health
and spirits. In mind he remains childish and unchanged,
as in body.

You may have noticed in the New York papers,
lately, a great abundance of essays upon bathing.
Since the Croton facilities, public attention has been
turned a good deal that way, and the prices of baths
have been universally diminished, while new bathing
establishments have been advertised in various parts of
the city. The new one lately opened by Stoppani in
Broadway, near the Apollo rooms, exceeds in splendor
anything we have yet seen in this line. A sumptuous
refectory is part of it; and the long, arched passages
of bathing-rooms remind one of the Roman establishments
in the way of baths. These were, anciently,
the centres around which luxuries of every description
were clustered; and Stoppani seems to have built this
with a view to sumptuous idling and enjoyment.

The most comprehensive view of Niagara is, no
doubt, that from the galleries of Clifton house;
but it is, at the same time, for a first view, one of the
most unfavorable. Clifton house stands nearly opposite
the centre of the irregular crescent formed by
the Falls; but it is so far back from the line of the
arc, that the height and grandeur of the two cataracts,
to an eye unacquainted with the scene, are deceptively
diminished. After once making the tour of the points
of view, however, the distance and elevation of the
hotel are allowed for by the eye, and the situation
seems most advantageous. This is the only house at
Niagara where a traveller, on his second visit, would
be content to live.

Clifton house is kept in the best style of hotels in
this country; but the usual routine of such places,
going on in the very eye of Niagara, weaves in very
whimsically with the eternal presence and power of
the cataract. We must eat, drink, and sleep, it is
true, at Niagara, as elsewhere; and indeed, what with
the exhaustion of mind and fatigue of body, we require
at the Falls perhaps more than usual of these
three “blessed inventions.” The leaf that is caught
away by the rapids, however, is not more entirely possessed
by this wonder of nature, than is the mind and
imagination of the traveller; and the arrest of that
leaf by the touch of the overhanging tree, or the
point of a rock amid the breakers, is scarce more momentary
than the interruption to the traveller's enchantment
by the circumstances of daily life. He
falls asleep with its surging thunders in his ear, and
wakes—to wonder, for an instant, if his yesterday's
astonishment was a dream. With the succeeding
thought, his mind refills, like a mountain channel,
whose torrent has been suspended by the frost, and he
is overwhelmed with sensations that are almost painful,
from the suddenness of their return. He rises
and throws up his window, and there it flashes, and
thunders, and agonizes—the same almighty miracle
of grandeur for ever going on; and he turns and wonders—
what the deuce can have become of his stockings!
He slips on his dressing-gown and commences
his toilet. The glass stands in the window, and with
his beard half achieved, he gets a glimpse of the foamcloud
rising majestically over the top of the mahogany
frame. Almost persuaded, like Queen Christina
at the fountains of St. Peter's, that a spectacle of
such splendor is not intended to last, he drops his
razor, and with the soap drying unheeded on his chin,
he leans on his elbows, and watches the yesty writhe
in the abysm, and the solemn pillars of crystal eternally
falling, like the fragments of some palace-crested
star, descending through interminable space. The
white field of the iris forms over the brow of the cataract,
exhibits its radiant bow, and sails away in a vanishing
cloud of vapor upon the wind; the tortured
and convulsed surface of the caldron below shoots out
its frothy and seething circles in perpetual torment;
the thunders are heaped upon each other, the earth
trembles, and—the bell rings for breakfast! A vision
of cold rolls, clammy omelets, and tepid tea, succeeds
these sublime images, and the traveller completes his
toilet. Breakfast over, he resorts to the colonnade,
to contemplate untiringly the scene before him, and
in the midst of a calculation of the progress of the
fall toward Lake Erie—with the perspiration standing
on his forehead, while he struggles to conceive the
junction of its waters with Lake Ontario—the rocks
rent, the hills swept away, forests prostrated, and the
islands uprooted in the mighty conflux—some one's
child escapes from its nurse, and seizing him by the
legs, cries out, “Da-da.”

The ennui attendant upon public houses can never
be felt at Clifton house. The most common mind
finds the spectacle from its balconies a sufficient and
untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited
parlors, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the
dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

barrooms filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of
travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half-hour
to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that
sickening yearning for society, which sometimes
comes upon a stranger in a strange land, like the calenture
of a fever—the eternal marvel going on without
is more engrossing than friend or conversation,
more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in
carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch
the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified
freight of adventures, one moment gliding swiftly
down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next,
lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up
from the scoop of a giant's hand beneath the water;
to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract,
to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the
shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and
endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of
the tremendous waters—is amusement and occupation
enough to draw the mind from anything—to cure
madness or create it.

I met Weir, the painter, at West Point, and he
was kind enough to give me a look at his just-finished
picture for the Rotundo at Washington. It was but
a glimpse of five minutes, while I was waiting for the
boat, but I have remembered every line of the picture
so distinctly since, that I can speak confidently,
at least, of its effect and power of possessing the
spectator. Let me transcribe for you the historical
passage taken for illustration:—

“And the time being come that they must depart,
they were accompanied with most of their brethren
out of the city to a town called Delft-Haven, where
the ship lay ready to receive them. The next day
the wind being fair, they went on board, and their
friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight
of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs
and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them, what
tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches
pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch
strangers that stood on the key as spectators could
not refrain from tears; yet comfortable and sweet it
was to see such lively and true expressions of dear
and unfeigned love. But the tide, which stays for no
man, calling them away that were thus loath to depart,
their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and
they all with him, with watery cheeks commended
them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and his
blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many
tears, they took their leave one of another, which
proved to be the last leave to many of them. Thus
hoisting sail, with a prosperous gale of wind, they
came in a short time to Southampton, where they
found the bigger ship come from London.”

It would be a curious subject of thought to a man
unfamiliar with the wardrobe of the imagination, if
he would keep this plain and simple passage of history
in his mind while he looks at the gorgeous investiture
in which it is clad by the genius of the painter—
to compare the picture in his mind while he read it
with the picture made of it on this canvass. I will
not attempt here—indeed I could not attempt, without
seeing it again—anything like a criticism on this
painting—but may say what I feel while it deepens in
my memory, that I have seen no such glorious work
of art in this country, and I have not been more filled
and wrought upon by any of the great chefs d'œuvre
of the masters in Europe. The effect on the mind
is that of expanding the capacity to embrace it.
Weir has drawn his figures on a scale larger than
life, and the immense canvass is filled with groups of
the most exquisite naturalness of posture and relation
to each other, but at the same time finished with
a breadth and strength of effect that looks done with
a hand accustomed to minister only to power without
limit. The coloring in the two wings of the picture
is exceedingly gorgeous, but the centre, around the
kneeling pastor, is admirably subdued in middle teints
appropriate to the objects they envelope, and the pastor
himself, in face, attitude, and costume, is the most
masterly embodiment of hallowed piety and devotion
which it is possible for poet to conceive. The presence,
on board of the vessel, of Mr. and Mrs. Winslow
(the new-married people of fortune, who, while
travelling for pleasure, fell in with and joined the emigrants
for conscience sake), gives the artist the necessary
liberty to enrich the costume of his picture, and
there are two or three other female figures very splendidly
drawn and colored—among them the wife of
Miles Standish, whose soldierly form in the foreground
is one of the most conspicuous objects. Of the
twenty-odd figures in this grand picture, there is not
one about which a great deal might not be written,
even with my transiently impressed memory of it, but
I reserve it for a more detailed description after another
visit. Weir has flung his soul upon this work with
the complete abandonment of inspiration, and he has
wrought out of it, for his country as well as himself,
honor imperishable.

I think it is some thirty miles from Albany to Saratoga,
and we did it at the respectable leisure of five
hours—rather more time than it took formerly on
wheels. True, we did not “devour the way” as we
used to do, and it was a comfort to arrive without a
lining of dust in one's mouth, but I missed the blowing
of the horn, the chirrup and crack of the whip
with which we used to dash through the sandy hollow
of Congress Spring and pull up at Congress Hall,
and I missed the group in the portico, and the greetings
and the green vines, and I missed—alas, for all
the misses of the past! The cars stop in the rear of
the “United States,” and the outstretched arms of
that new caravansary, in the shape of two yellow
wings extending to the depot, embrace you as you
come to the ground. My friends were all there, and
Congress Hall was down hill, in fact and in figure of
speech, and casting poetry and the past behind me, I
rattled to the rising sun and took lodgings with the
Marvins. The ex-president was there, with the thirty
or forty pounds of flesh that would not be recognised
by the presidential chair, and from five to six
hundred of his former subjects sat down with him to
dine. Mr. Van Buren has stuck to the “United
States,” till fashion has gone over to him, for he frequented
the house when the belles were on the other
side of the street. Whether in the dance of politics,
the democracy “chassez across,” and leave him on
the fashionable side, remains to be seen.

I had not been at “The Springs” for some years,
and between the changes in the place and the changes
in myself, I was, for a while (as the French charmingly
express it) desorienté. In the times that were, a gentleman,
on arriving at Saratoga, made his submission
to one or two ladies in whom was vested the gynocracy
of the season—the mother of a belle, or an exbelle
well preserved, or some marvellous old maid,
witty and kindly. Through this door, and this only,
could the society of the place be reached, and to this
authority the last appeal was made in all cases of doubt
and difficulty. The beaux and belles conformed and
submitted, exchanged hearts and promised hands, and
drove and danced, fished and picnicked, in obedience
to this administration—Coventry the dreadful alternative.
There were fashionable old-bachelor beaux
in those days who were the masters of ceremony, and
there were belles, upon whom, individually, was concentrated
the beauty now distributed in small parcels
over the female population of a state. Every girl is
tolerably pretty now. Everybody is, to the extent of

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

his natural capacity, a beau. There is no authority
higher than every young lady's mamma. Sent to
Coventry by one party, you may stay “at court” with
another. Flirts are let flirt without snaffle or martingal.
Fortunes are guarded only by the parental
dragon. Nabobs and aristocrats are received upon
their natural advantages without prestige or favor, and
everybody knows everybody, particularly if not from
the same city. Having been happiest myself under
the old régime, this agrarian anarchy somewhat offended
me; and the more, perhaps, that among the
company at the “United States,” naturally secluding
herself somewhat from the crowd, is one of the concentrations
of the beauty of ten years ago—a most
magnificent woman whom that lustrum of time has
passed over as lightly as a night's sleep.

Still, there is beauty at Saratoga—enough, indeed,
for all purposes of dreaming or waking. The ball at
the “United States” on Friday evening was exceedingly
brilliant, and at the concert of Castellan on Saturday,
when the more serious beauties of Union Hall
were added to the assembly, the large saloon was
thought to be very thickly spangled with loveliness.
At this last-named hotel, by the way, they have introduced
family prayers at nine o'clock, and at another
less-frequented house they give tea with the dinner—
little differences which seem to classify the patronage
very effectively. This is the great season of Saratoga,
more persons being now at its different hotels than
were ever recorded in any previous season. I must
not omit to mention the charming improvements by
Mr. Clark in the gem of a valley above Congress
spring (by walks, shrubbery, etc.), nor the elegance
of Marvin's grounds and embellishments at the United
States—a superb hotel indeed, in all its appointments.

This is “hop-night” at the Astor, and among the
crowd of ladies in the house are a few on their return
from Saratoga. The beaux tire of “The Springs”
sooner than the belles, and in Broadway yesterday I
saw a thick sprinkling of the desirables. Indeed, the
weather has been temperate enough to make the city
agreeable, and the southerners prefer enjoying Niblo's
and the comfortable hotels, when the thermometer
ranges below ninety. The boats down the river are
very full just now. I came down from West Point in
the Empire on Thursday, and found her crowded
with presentable company; and with the elegance of
the saloons and decks, looking very drawing-roomsical
and gay. There is a great deal of gammon in the
reasons given for going and for not going to the Springs;
and it is the fashion now for those who are not there
to ascribe their absence to a horror of the letter-writers,
as if any would be mentioned at all by those immortality-bestowing
gentry who did not, by flirting
and display, show an appetite for notoriety, and in a
crowd, too, quite as promiscuous as the reading public!
It would surprise a believing Judeus, after listening
to the indignation current in the saloon of Saratoga
in the evening, on the subject of the penny papers,
to see with what eagerness they are read the
next morning, and with what manifest pleasure each
lady mentioned shows to her admirers the paragraph
peccant. That such letters as I refer to are a very
great evil no man who respects the delicacy of private
life can doubt; but one half of the mischief, at least,
lies in the unwomanly passion for notoriety to which
they minister.

Those who linger longest at Saratoga are the families
of resident New-Yorkers, their return to town being
the return to the solitude of a house to themselves.
For “mineral waters” read “society in large doses;”
and the real object of attraction is as easily found at
the “Astor” or the “American” as at Saratoga. The
sea air of Rockaway may stand for a tenth of its attractions,
and the other nine parts lie in the necessity
of some excusable resort in the neighborhood of the
city, which shall supply to the New-Yorkers what the
hotels (as a sequel to the Springs) are to travelling
strangers. From about the twentieth of this month
to the first cool weather, Rockaway will be thronged
with excellent society, mostly from this city; and
there is a nucleus of half a dozen of the most delightful
women in any country, summering there regularly;
three admirably lively and accomplished ladies of one
family the leading constellation. It is a part of the
commonplacery of fashionable chat to fret at the
crowd, and wish for more suitable privacy; but it is
amusing to observe what a difference of opinion there
seems to be between the feet and tongue of the fair
exclusive. The belle at Saratoga rises at six and
walks to Congress spring. The ostensible object is
to drink the waters, which she might have in quite as
salutary a state by ringing the bell of her apartment.
The platform around the spring is crowded with fashionables;
and, elbowed and stared at rather freely, and
complaining of both very feelingly, she remains in the
crowd till breakfast—solitary walks of the most shaded
coolness though there be, hard by and accessible.
She breakfasts with five hundred persons, and from
the table comes to the drawing-room, where she
promenades, and is elbowed as before, till eleven. At
that hour she goes with a party to the bowling-alleys,
where she amuses herself till the dressing-bell for dinner.
And after dinner she mingles in the full-dress crowd
once more till tea-time (with perhaps the parenthesis
of a drive with a party to the lake), and from tea-time
till midnight she is in the same crowd, and goes to
bed late to get up again early, and so, burning her
candle at both ends, finds Saratoga enchanting. But
it is not the less “dreadfully crowded,” and “horridly
mixed.”

The music at Saratoga was one of its pleasures to
me. The band plays at the spring from six to eight
in the morning, and the morning hours (anacreontics
to the contrary notwithstanding) are the part
of the day when the senses are most acutely sensitive
to pleasure. If I am to see a fine picture with the
clearest eye, or read a page of poetry with the subtlest
appreciation, or listen to the sweet divisions of music
with the nicest and most interpreting ear, or hear a
deep-found thought of love, friendship, or philosophy,
give it me in the early morning of midsummer. The
perturbed blood flows evenly, and the perceptions
have settled over-night like a roiled well; and (if in
temperate health) the heart is softer and more susceptible.
To express a plain fact poetically—the marble
lid is lifted from the fountain of tears at that hour,
and though the waters do not “well forth,” they are
open to the dropping in of those pearls of attendant
angels—love, beauty, and music. Yet, “before
breakfast” is said commonly to be the prose of the day.

One hour of music after dinner is made tributary to
the smokers. The ladies and the tobacco eschewers
are out of its reach in the drawing-room, but the papas
and the inveterates bring their chairs out to the
grassy area of the “United States,” and smoke under
the shade, listening to the German band contentedly
and contemplatively. And that is a very pleasant
hour; and taken advantage of by those who, like myself,
find comfort in the ellipses of conversation.

As to living at Saratoga, no reasonable person would
expect a comfortable dinner, sitting down with five or
six hundred persons. The meats get cold in the
spreading. But, to those who are drinking the waters,
any check upon the appetite is not unsalutary,
and, for the gourmet, the Lake House, and one or two
other resorts in the neighborhood, offer game and fish
dinners in compensatory perfection. I went over to
Barhydt's dark lake, the scene of the loves of the lustrum
gone by, and found it looking neglected and forsaken.
The old Dutchman is dead, and his quiet
successors look out with repelling surprise upon the

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

gay and intruding visiters. It has ceased to be frequented.

I saw at the engraver's yesterday a portrait of
Halleck, engraved for Graham's Magazine, which exceeds
anything I have before seen, as a worthy and
truthful representation of a poet. It is to be published
in the September number, I believe, and is one of the
well-conceived series of portraits in progress of publication
in that magazine. The keen, joyous, analytical
gusto which give such a “sauce Robert” to Halleck's
poetry is admirably conveyed in this picture,
and a more faithful likeness was never drawn. The
original is by Inman.

Broadway in August is like a pocket-full of change
with the gold and silver picked out of it; and like the
disrespectful finger thrust by its owner into its scarce
diminished bulk, Mr. Stopintown, the lounger, contemptuously
threads the crowd, of which he knows
the less precious and residual quality. But let us try
again—for this beginning is too Jeremy-Taylor-ous.

Have you ever started at Niblo's, dear reader, and,
with your eyes particularly open, walked down the
“shilling side” of Broadway to the Park? You
must have done this, and with speculation in your
eyes too, before you can detect, on the fashionable
side of Broadway in August, a certain class of promenaders
visible there in no other month, by gas or day-light.
Now it occurs to us, that, in the spiritual geography
of this shop-and-show land, we can very possibly
give you a lesson.

Few people live more in the eye of the world than
than those who are in transition from poverty to riches,
bound upward. None are so invisible as those
who are going over the same road, downward. The
eye, in the city, acquires a habit of selecting what it
shall see. Glimpse, the porter (to put it figuratively),
sits in the outer vestibule of sight, and passes his
judgment on all comers before they are admitted
to the presence of consciousness. Prosperity has a
color of its own, and a coat with a needy pocket in its
skirt is as invisible as the sick heart it is buttoned
over. You walk Broadway from the Battery to Bond
street (on the golden side), and you remark every flippery-flirt
and boy-beau, and could recal upon oath
their respective riband and waistcoat; yet a man of
genius has gone by, with a thought in his brain new
from God, but under a hat set distrustfully on, and
you would swear in a witness-box that he never
crossed your eye. Visible is an arbitrary word in
large cities.

But it is a devilish truth that in proportion as the
poverty-stricken become invisible, their consciousness
of being seen becomes painfully sensitive. They feel
pointed at with the finger when they are as totally unobserved
as the driver of an omnibus. The prosperous
and gay, too—the very persons who are blindest
to their presence—seem to them their most vigilant
and insulting observers. And as there is a side of the
street proper to the rich and the happy, the poor and
wretched walk on the other. The great haunt of the
distressed—the Alsatia of poverty and crime—the lair
of the outcast of hope and pity—borders Broadway
on the east. In their recoil from the abyss they hang
over—turning back in terror from the fiendish abandonment
of the Five Points, the last platform between
despair and death—the unhappy come to that limit of
Broadway and look across. And up and down, between
Prince street and Chamber, they walk, with a
shunning gait, and shoulders shrinking at your look
as from a blow, and watch the happy on the other
side—wretched men of all degrees of desperation,
from the first downward step to the last.

Oh, you should walk there, now and then! You
will walk there—perhaps you have, with unconscious
selection, already—when in want of money. With
the same clothes you wore when you had enough—
with a cravat as saucily expensive—gloved and booted
comme il faut—you will instinctively take the other
side of the street if out of pocket—if a five-dollar bill,
that is to say—unconsidered rag not long before—covers
now as much void as the zodiac! Oh, most comparative
five-dollar bill!

But the faces on the “shilling side” of Broadway!
If you want a heart-ache, to be succeeded by content
with your lot and a prayer to God, cross over and look
at one or two. The eyelid unrelaxed—the mouth
shut up within, and the lips bloodless with the compression
of the tongue matted to the teeth—the livid
pits beneath the eyes, and the veins blood-shot round
the pupil—the rigid neck—the jaw set up with desperate
endurance—the contracted nostril, and the complexion
set and dead. And this is the countenance
of only poverty—only the agony of one man wanting
a little of what another has too much of—of
which the church, building for the God of mercy at
the head of Wall street, has millions more than it can
spend without ingenuity of extravagance! Are you
and I parts of a world like this, dear reader!

But in August the gay and prosperous go off, and
the golden-side of Broadway is left to the mechanical
and the stranger. Of these the shabby and unhappy
have no dread, and they come over and walk, with
only their despair, in the haunts they once frequented.
You will see them in Broadway now—your attention
once directed to them—and if it be on Saturday, preach
who will on Sunday, you will have profited the day
before by a better sermon.

In looking down on the valley of Wyoming, made
memorable by savage barbarity and famous by the
poet's wand of enchantment, it is natural to indulge
in resentful feeling toward the sanguinary race whose
atrocities make up its page in story. It is a pity, however,
that they, too, had not a poet and a partial chronicler.
Leaving entirely out of view the ten thousand
wrongs done by the white man to the Indian, in the
corruption, robbery, and rapid extinction of his race,
there are personal atrocities, on our own records exercised
toward that ill-fated people, which, in impartial
history hereafter, will redeem them from all charge
except that of irresistible retaliation. The brief story
of the famous Cornstalk, sachem of the Shawanees,
and king of the northern confederacy, is sermon
enough on this text.

The northwestern corner of Virginia, and that part
of Pennsylvania contiguous, on the south, was the
scene of some of the bloodiest events of Indian warfare.
Distinguished over all other red men of this
this region, was Cornstalk. He was equally a terror
to the men of his own tribe (whom he did not hesitate
to hew down with his tomahawk if they showed any
cowardice in fight), and a formidable opponent to our
troops, from his military talents and personal daring.
He was, at the same time, more than all the other
chiefs of the confederacy, a friend to the whites; and,
energetic as he was when once engaged in battle,
never took up arms willingly against them. After the
bloody contest at Point Pleasant, in which Cornstalk
had displayed his generalship and bravery, to the admiration
of his foes, he came in to the camp of Lord
Dunmore, to make negotiations for peace. Colonel
Wilson, one of the staff, thus describes his oratory:
“When he arose, he was nowise confused or daunted,
but spoke in a distinct and audible voice, without
stammering or repetition, and with peculiar emphasis.
His looks, while addressing Dunmore, were truly
grand and majestic, yet graceful and attractive. I have

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

heard many celebrated orators, but never one whose
powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on
this occasion.”

In the spring of 1777, it was known that an extensive
coalition was forming among the tribes, and that
it only waited the consent and powerful aid of the
Shawanees, to commence war upon the whites. At
this critical time, Cornstalk, accompanied by Red
Hawk, came on a friendly visit to the fort at Point
Pleasant, communicated the intentions of the tribes,
and expressed his sorrow that the tide set so strongly
against the colonists, that he must go with it in spite
of all his endeavors.

Upon receiving this information, given by the noble
savage in the spirit of a generous enemy, the commander
of the garrison seized upon Cornstalk and his
companion as hostages for the peaceful conduct of his
nation, and set about availing himself of the advantage
he had gained by his suggestions. During his
captivity, Cornstalk held frequent conversations with
the officers, and took pleasure in describing to them
the geography of the west, then little known. One
afternoon, while he was engaged in drawing on the
floor a map of the Missouri territory, its water-courses
and mountains, a halloo was heard from the forest,
which he recognised as the voice of his son Ellinipsico,
a young warrior, whose courage and address
were almost as celebrated as his own. Ellinipsico entered
the fort, and embraced his father most affectionately,
having been uneasy at his long absence, and
come hither in search of him.

The day after his arrival, a soldier went out from
the fort on a hunting excursion, and was shot by Indians.
His infuriated companions instantly resolved
to sacrifice Cornstalk and his son. They charged
upon Ellinipsico that the offenders were in his company,
but he declared that he had come alone, and
with the sole object of seeking his father. When the
soldiers came within hearing, the young warrior appeared
agitated. Cornstalk encouraged him to meet
his fate composedly, and said to him, “My son, the
Great Spirit has sent you here that we may die together!”
He turned to meet his murderers the next
instant, and receiving seven bullets in his body,
expired without a groan.

When Cornstalk had fallen, Ellinipsico continued
still and passive, not even raising himself from his
seat. He met death in that position with the utmost
calmness. “The other Indian,” says the chronicle,
“was murdered piecemeal, and with all those circumstances
of cruelty with which the savage wreaks his
vengeance on his enemy.”

The day before his death, Cornstalk had been present
at a council of the officers, and had spoken to
them on the subject of the war, with his own peculiar
eloquence. In the course of his remarks, he expressed
something like a presentiment of his fate. “When
I was young,” he said, “and went out to war, I often
thought each would be my last adventure, and I
should return no more. I still lived. Now I am in
the midst of you, and, if you choose, you may kill
me. I can die but once. It is alike to me whether
now or hereafter!”

His atrocious murder was dearly expiated. The
Shawanees, the most warlike tribe of the west, became
thenceforward the most deadly and implacable foes to
the white man.

Nine o'clock—an August morning—and every breath
out of doors like a bird's life pressed into a minute!
The breast of the earth naked to the sun—the air in
a trance—the river breathless with the beauty of the
sky it mirrors—and at such an hour to see the ghost
of a mended pen and a stubborn resolution! Out
upon the art of writing! Is there no honest wood-
chopper, no dog, no squirrel, no anything out of
doors, that will change lives with me! Down, school-boy
heart! and come hither, since thou must, pen,
ink, and paper!—stationary, indeed!

Close the shutters now, and bring candles! If I am
to sit at this table till noon, I will have it night. Slippers,
Thomas! And then shut the stable-door; my
horse neighs; lock up the saddle and lose the key!
And, Thomas! lend old Peter my boat, and break the
fishing-rod, and scare away the birds from the window.
Has a skylark possessed my soul or no—
that I so hate the roof over my head this radiant
morning.

Play to me ere I begin! Music is creative! What
a benefactor to the world is John Chickering! How
exquisitely balanced are those octaves, and how gloriously
(with that touch) the rich instrument revels
through the music! The builder of these caves of
harmony has a poet's vocation. What is poetry but
the vehicle of man's enthusiasm—the element in
which float fancy and feeling—the suggestive awakener
of intellect—the soother of care and pain! He who
writes a poem that is read and loved by a thousand
hearths, links himself with an angel's round of delight
and sympathy; and the builder of a thousand harmonious
instruments follows in the same bright orbit of
influence. It has been said that “he who can not find
happiness can not find an easy-chair.” For easy-chair
I read one of the evenly-balanced, rich, true, roundtoned
and incomparable instruments of John Chickering.
I have erected mine into a household god!

Play me those “Hope Waltzes” again. They
come off like Ariel's spiriting. But to bewitch the
heels and stir the brain the “Flower Waltzes” against
the world! I have made out their language by daily
listening to them, and if I can not divine the composer's
thought when they were born, I can tell what
they express, as I can what all music expresses that I
love and hear often. It is the difference between good
and bad music, that one is an articulate thought, and
the other mere jingle and gibberish. Among the
“coming events” that “cast their shadows before,” is,
I think, a musical era, in which the intellectual qualities
of harmony in sounds will be studied and understood.
For one of the most powerful levers on the
human heart, singly or in mass, music has been
strangely undervalued, and its professors and masters
have been as strangely stigmatized as an idle and unintellectual
class of people. A revolution has begun in
church music, and in Boston (by the efforts of one
educated and enthusiastic man, Mr. Mason) the
church choirs have become as effective and eloquent
as the sermon. The perfection to which Chickering
has brought the structure of that universal instrument,
the piano; this musical reform in Boston; the
introduction of singing into the systems of education
for children, and last (not least surprising), the adoption
of music as a political engine, and its powerful
operation, are “signs of the times” which would warrant
a musical man of genius in creating a new liberal
profession—the adaptation of expression to sound,
and the marriage of emotion to music. Moore understands
this mystery, and when in Spain (I once heard
him say) wrote several of his most pathetic songs to
the gayest airs of the peasantry. We have tried rewording
old songs with some effect, and it is like
bringing notes to their right mind and making them
talk sense. There is a delicious thing by Topliff—
“Consider the lilies how they grow”—which makes
one feel as if the whole Bible should be chanted; and
the “Six Songs from Scripture,” by Moore, are very
beautiful. But admirably as Moore's words are always
married to his music, there is one song of his
set to an air of Bellini's, which seems to me the masterpiece
of sense linked to corresponding harmony. I
can not at this moment name the opera from which

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

the air is taken, nor the volume of Moore which contains
the poetry. It commences


“Is it not sweet to think, hereafter,
When the spirit leaves this sphere,”
and is published in a book called “Kingsley's Choir.”
It is a song to “lap you in Elysium.”

From Memnon to Helicon is but to “jump Jim
Crow.” Who is writing poetry? Nobody in England,
I think, but Mrs. Norton, and out of her sorrows
this beautiful woman is beginning to weave herself an
immortality. The allusion to her mother in one of
her late fugitive pieces, and the frequent mention of
her children, are touched in the very deepest truth of
nature as well as in the finest skill of the poet. It was
necessary for the world that this fine genius should be
“tried by fire.” With her remarkable beauty, naturally
gay spirits, and unequalled powers of fascination,
Mrs. Norton, had the course of her life and love run
smooth, would never have sounded those sorrowful
depths of her heart from which wells out the bitterness
so sweet in song. Happy—we should have
heard but of her beauty. Wronged, persecuted, and
robbed of her children and her good name—we
build her an altar in our hearts as the most gifted poetess
of her time, and posterity will perpetuate the worship.
Is this compensation or no?

By that blast upon the farmer's dinner-horn, twelve
o'clock! Avaunt, quill! “sweat of my brow!” In
how many shapes comes the curse of the fall upon us!
This horn, which calls in my farmer to repose from
his curse in his chair, releases me from mine to let me
amuse myself with his labor. My curse is worked
out indoors—his in the field. The literal “sweat of
the brow” is my greatest happiness, and his heavy fulfilment
of the anathema. Light sits his curse, however,
to my thinking, who bears it out of doors! The
yearning for physical action, impatience of confinement,
dislike of the cobweb niceties of life, seem to
me feelings which grow into passions with increasing
years. Will no one invent a daguerreotype for the
mind, that our thoughts may record themselves—letting
us walk where we list? The pencil is to be done
away with—why not the pen?

Weir, the painter, is moving his glorious picture to
Boston, for exhibition. It will be opened to visiters
there by the first of September. It is to be exhibited,
afterward, at the National Academy in New York—the
first home of the pilgrims having, very properly, the
honor of the first sight of it. Weir will steep himself
in his countrymen's hearts, as his picture shows them
how honestly, as well as with what splendor of genius,
he has executed their commission. I understand that
Vanderlyn's picture is very fine. There are several
persons employed in filling up his design, but Mr.
Vanderlyn's own pencil is to harmonize and finish it.
Mr. Morse has given up his palette and brushes, to
devote himself to his electro-galvanic telegraph, which
is now being laid down. The visit of Inman, the
painter, to England, is partly an errand for the study
of costume and data required for his picture for the
rotunda.

There seems to be a lull in literature, which I hope
is the precursor of a storm on the subject of copyright.
No new books of any description since the
“Last of the Barons.” The “Change for American
Notes” is not by Miss Sedgwick, and I presume that
the editor of the Enquirer, who must be acquainted,
as well as anybody, with her propriety “thrice bolted
o'er,” had not looked into the free-and-easy pages of
the book when he pronounced her the authoress.
There is some dispute over julep-straws about the
authorship of “Philip in Search of a Wife.” It is
“by a Gentleman Butterfly,” and is a sequel to “Kate
in Search of a Husband,” by Lady Chrysalis. But
public rumor, which was foiled in striving to identify
the lady chrysalis with the brightest of the callow
divinities of Broadway, has covered the wings of the
gentleman butterfly with the same attractive petticoat.
Having no eyesight to spare, I wait for an Appleton
edition before reading the book. I think that the two
or three tricks practised upon title-pages not long ago,
have materially hurt the credit of those respectable
old truth-tellers, and at the same time have dampened
the interest in new publications.

TO MISS VIOLET MABY, AT SARATOGA.
Astor House, August, 1843.

Start fair, my sweet Violet! This letter will lie on
your table when you arrive at Saratoga, and it is intended
to prepare you for that critical campaign. You
must know the ammunition with which you go into
the field. I have seen service, as you know, and,
from my retirement (on half-pay), can both devise
strategy and reconnoitre the enemy's weakness, with
discretion. Set your glass before you on the table,
and let us hold a frank council of war.

You never were called beautiful, as you know; and
at home you have not been a belle—but that is no impediment.
You are to be beautiful, now, or at least
to produce the result of beauty, which is the same
thing; and of course you are to be a belle—the belle,
if I mistake not, of the season. Look in your mirror,
for a moment, and refresh your memory with the
wherewithal.

You observe that your mouth has blunt corners—
which, properly managed, is a most effective feature.
Your complexion is rather darkly pale, your forehead
is a shade lower than is thought desirable, your lips
are full, sweet, and indolent, and your eyes are not
remarkable unless when well handled. The lids have
a beauty, however, which a sculptor would understand,
and the duskiness around them may intensify, exceedingly,
one particular expression. Your figure is admirably
perfect, but in this country, and particularly
among the men you are to control, this large portion
of female beauty is neither studied nor valued. Your
hair is too profuse to be dressed quite fashionably, but
it is a beauty not to be lost, so it must be coiffed a
l'abandon—a very taking style to a man once brought
to the point of studying you.

There are two phases in your character, Violet—
earnestness and repose. The latter shows your features
to the most advantage, besides being a most captivating
quality in itself. I would use it altogether for
the first week. Gayety will never do. A laugh on a
face like yours is fatal. It spreads, into unmeaning
platitude, the little wells in the corners of your mouth
(the blunt corners I spoke of above), and it makes
your eyes smaller—which they can not well bear.
Your teeth are minion and white, it is true, but they
show charmingly when you speak, and are excellent,
as reserved artillery, to follow an introduction. Save
your mirth till the game is won, my dear Violet!

Of course you will not appear at breakfast the first
morning after your arrival. The mental atmosphere
of the unaired hours is too cold and questioning for a
first appearance. So is the hungry half-hour till the
soup is removed. Go down late to dinner. Till after
the first glass of wine, the heart of man is a shut
book—opened then for entries, and accessible till shut
again by sleep. You need no table-lesson. You eat
elegantly, and, with that swan's-neck wrist, curving
and ivory-fair, your every movement is ammunition
well-bestowed. But there may, or may not, be a victim
on the other side of the table.

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