if to mirror the magnificence of the place; from the north the track
winds along the banks of the Delaware, white with its coastwise
commerce, in and out among the beautiful bridges that arch the
Schuylkill, across the broad Susquehanna, past blazing forges and
foundries, and over the long and lonely expanses of the two Gunpowder
Rivers--desert wastes of water, stretching for miles away without a
sail, without a light, in the melancholy grandeur of a very dream of
desolation. If it is at night that you step from the station, halfway
down the distance you presently see the ray of a street-lamp throw up
the façade of the Patent Office in broken light and shadow; you see
before you and under the hill the twinkle of scattered groups of
light; you see, far off, the long row of the Treasury columns half
lost in darkness, and you will remember pictured scenes of bivouacs
among the ruins of Baalbec. And if it is in the morning that you
arrive, fresh from the turbulence of Broadway, from the quaint and
tortuous hillside lanes of Boston, from the elegant monotony
of Philadelphia, the impression made upon you is still not very
different. Though you are in the heart of the place, it seems to lie
before you like a city in the distance. Now the mist is stripped away
from some massive marble pile; now a prospect opens of river and wood
and the pillared heights of Arlington; now a lofty heaven reveals
a waning moon, it may be--for every square has its horizon--the
morning-star flames out, a red and yellow sunrise burns behind the
silver cloud of the Capitol dome, and the whole city, in its splendor
and its squalor, bared to view, gives you a suffocating sense of the
pettiness of all other places before the opulence of sky, the width
and height, the light and space and air, that Washington affords.

The concentric labyrinth of the city's plan is indeed something
altogether unique; but whether it owes its origin to the fear of the