_February 24th._--A spell of fine soft weather. I wander about a good
deal, sometimes at night under the moon. Tonight took a long look at
the President's house. The white portico--the palace-like, tall,
round columns, spotless as snow--the walls also--the tender and
soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint
languishing shades, not shadows--everywhere a soft transparent
hazy, thin, blue moon-lace, hanging in the air--the brilliant and
extra-plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the facade, columns,
portico, &c.--everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet
soft--the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there
in the soft and copious moon--the gorgeous front, in the trees, under
the lustrous flooding moon, full of realty, full of illusion--the
forms of the trees, leafless, silent, in trunk and myriad--angles of
branches, under the stars and sky--the White House of the land, and of
beauty and night--sentries at the gates, and by the portico, silent,
pacing there in blue overcoats--stopping you not at all, but eyeing
you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move.


AN ARMY HOSPITAL WARD

Let me specialize a visit I made to the collection of barrack-like
one-story edifices, Campbell hospital, out on the flats, at the end
of the then horse railway route, on Seventh street. There is a
long building appropriated to each ward. Let us go into ward 6. It
contains, to-day, I should judge, eighty or a hundred patients,
half sick, half wounded. The edifice is nothing but boards, well
whitewash'd inside, and the usual slender-framed iron bedsteads,
narrow and plain. You walk down the central passage, with a row on
either side, their feet towards you, and their heads to the wall.