old French barricade or to a desire for grandeur and scope, the effect
attained is the same one of airy magnificence--monstrous avenues
crossing the right angles of the streets in diagonals radiating from
the White House and the Capitol, and all tiresomeness prevented by
the accommodating way which these avenues have of turning out for any
edifice that fancies their situation; while to keep upon them you are
so perpetually crossing one street or losing your way down another
that you may almost imagine yourself a spider walking across a web.

The designer of all this must have had a city in his mind's eye that
rivaled Napoleon's Paris--buildings, monuments, marbles, fountains,
trees, and everywhere great spaces and shining skies. For years,
though, this visionary city has existed only among the castles of the
air, and it is within a little while that the District government has
begun to put in a substantial underpinning to the cloudy fabric. But
although wretched thoroughfares and dilapidated dwellings, until the
last decade, have characterized the place, the fine public buildings
have for a long while awaited their fit surroundings--buildings mostly
of the Grecian types, which, however unfit they might be for a land
where damp dark heavens make all the spires that can spring up to
catch the sunshine a necessity, are perfectly appropriate to a climate
where the long hot summers demand the shelter of flat roofs and cool
protecting porticoes. There are, then, already, the Patent Office,
with its massive Doric simplicity; the Treasury, with the superb
extent of its columned sides; the Post Office, with its dazzling
Corinthian splendor; the Institution, with its romantic towers and
turrets of dark red stone, ivy-grown and in the midst of gardens; and
the Capitol, whose dome rises over the city, so pale, so perfect and
so buoyant that it seems only a cloud among the clouds--a pile that by
daylight looks like a white altar of liberty set on its hilltop among