Chapter III: Part 3

The hall was very light, draped and festooned simply with the American and two Japanese flags intertwined, the whole giving a certain gauzy effect, which was pretty, if not fairy-like nor magnificent. Upon a little platform at the end of the hall stood the guest and other distinguished ministers. The space in the middle of the hall, between improvised columns, was kept clear for some time, so that the picture was charming. The throng pressed slowly up one side of the room towards the platform, and, passing across it in front of the various members of the embassy, were received by the Secretary of State and the Japanese minister, and by the latter presented to Iwakura. He was dressed, with all his associates, in the sad sables with which Western nations mourn their own gayety. Instead of some glittering cloth of gold, in which, whatever the fact may have been at the White House, we might have expected an ambassador from Zipango or El Dorado to be arrayed, we had the familiar and useful black broadcloth coat and trousers of civilization. But when Sir Philip Sidney, in flowered velvet, was presented to the great William of Orange, William was clad in a plain serge coat, and Sir Philip probably did not know it, or forgot it. And as the gallant Sidneys at this feast were presented to the chief ambassador, they doubtless saw the man and not his clothes.

Iwakura is about fifty years old; not a large man; of great dignity and serenity of character and manners, with a high-bred and elegant air, and a face of clear intelligence and refinement. He bowed courteously to every guest, with a subtile distance of salutation without offence which is peculiar to many men of high self-respect. Hand-shaking is the most religiously observed of all the social rites in Washington, and especially and amusingly by the diplomatic corps, who evidently constrain themselves to observe punctually this sacred habit; but Iwakura did not offer his hand, yet did not refuse to engage in the ceremony when it was unavoidable. Beyond him in the line were the chief ladies of the occasion, the wives of the Vice-President, of the Secretary of State, of the Speaker, and of the other secretaries. It was simply a republican court, recalling the days when President Washington and his wife stood upon a slightly raised dais at the end of the hall, there being about those three inches of monarchy left at the beginning of the republic, before Thomas Jefferson, alighting from his horse, hitched him by the bridle to the fence, and then went into the Capitol to be inaugurated President.

Descending from the immediate presence, the guests gathered in lines along the hall, or slowly promenaded, engaged in watching and in criticising each other. Meanwhile the band played, and the canaries, excited by the music and the lights, sang loud and clear. Not so sweetly sang the gossips, as they whispered and exclaimed at each other's fresh oddity or extravagance of attire. Gently, good gossips! gently! for even at this moment is the Scripture fulfilled, and ye who judge are judged. "In a world where Martin Farquhar Tupper passes to the thirty-seventh edition," said Thackeray, in a company of authors, "let us all think small-beer of ourselves." When to the eye of men the dress of the fairer sex is altogether bewildering, and certainly not, as Professor Teufelsdrockh would say, unbeautiful, why should the good gossip invidiously discriminate? Peace, peace! The sober matron at whom you smile wears the plain dress because she preferred to pay her boy's college bills with the money that would have arrayed her in Parisian robes had he stayed at home. And you, dear madam, daughter of Fortunatus and heiress of his purse, you wear those ponderous diamonds and nudge your neighbors to look and laugh with you.

Hark the soft prelude of the waltz. What is the mysterious pathos of that long pulsing strain? Why is that measure, moving to which the joy and the hope of youth celebrate their triumph, of all measures the most passionately sad? One after another the partners glide into the dance. They swim, they float, they circle, they move in music and to music. And what is this, and who is here? this comet, this meteor of a couple, who come pumping and dashing through the throng. Are her hands really laid upon his shoulders? Do his hands clasp her elbows, or is it an extraordinary dream? No wonder that Japan draws to the edge of the dais and gazes in wonder, for America also looks on in amazement. The amused incredulity of the foreign guests as they watch the dancing is interesting to see. Iwakura regards the scene with smiling gravity. To him the spectacle seems a thousandfold more against nature than the vision of a woman voting can possibly be to the most conservative American. Yet the ambassador will find that the loveliest woman may waltz with a man and still be womanly, and the conservative American may go and do likewise. The fashions of a time and the traditions of a nation are not the final laws of nature, and even Horatio's philosophy does not exhaust the things in heaven and earth that are yet to be.

The ambassadors are still gazing, the band is still playing, and the birds are still singing over the happy dancers as we come away. There is a desperate but brief struggle at the orifice in the corner, whence, to our delight, our coats emerge. We have a glimpse into the ladies' tiring-room, where, like bright-winged birds, they are pluming themselves for flight. Upon the steep staircase, where they stand waiting for their carriages, there is tranquillity and order, so excellent are the arrangements. Scores of sentences are left in fragments upon the stairs, for in the midst of a remark the cry resounds, "The Honorable Mr. Iago's carriage, Mrs. Bluebeard's, The Ambassador from San Salvador, Mr. Smith-Jones's carriage!" And instantly the bright-winged birds are flown, and rose-buds and violets go home to happy dreams.

THE MAID AND THE WIT

The fabled stream that sank from sight, and emerged far away, still flowing, is an image of the course of all progress. The argument which establishes the reason and the benefit of reform does not, therefore, at once establish it, still less complete it. There are obstructions, delays, disappearances; but still the stream flows, seen or unseen, still it swells, and reappearing far beyond where it vanished, moves brimming to the sea.

The Lady Mavourneen, who, coming to us straight from Paris, found here a courteous regard for women, which she said that after a life's residence she had not found in France, was only just to Americans. Nowhere is there such instinctive and universal consideration for the gentler sex, notwithstanding the occasional spectacle of the woman standing in the elevated railroad car, and the necessity under which the elderly wit found himself in the omnibus, when, seeing a comely young woman standing, he said to his son sitting in his lap, "My son, why don't you get up and give the lady your seat?"

Despite such gayety in the omnibus, and such devout reading of the newspapers in the elevated cars that the devotees cannot see women standing, even those women, if they are travelled, would agree that, upon the whole, in no civilized country have they encountered more deference to the sex as such than in America. Yet the courtesy is that of a clever as well as polite people. If the comely maid in the omnibus had suddenly and sweetly asked the elderly wit whether he was a true American, and believed that taxation and representation should go together, he would have promptly replied, "Yes, ma'am." But if she had then whipped out her logical rapier and thrust at him the question, "Are you, then, in favor of giving me a vote?" his cleverness and his courtesy would have blended in his reply, "Madam, when women demand it, they will have it." It is the universal reply of the ingenious patriot who is aware that the argument is against him, but who is still unconvinced. The stream of logic sinks in the sands of his scepticism, but it will reappear still further on, flowing with a fuller current towards its goal.

If the omnibus were a convenient ground for such bouts of argument, the maid has plenty of other keen rapiers in reserve with which she would pierce his courteous incredulity. One of the sharpest would be the rejoinder of inquiry whether it was the general custom of Legislatures to wait until everybody interested in a reform asked for it before granting it. Having inserted the point of the weapon, she would turn it around, to the great inconvenience of the elderly wit, by further asking specifically whether imprisonment for debt was abolished because poor debtors as a body requested it or because it was deemed best in the general interest that it should be abolished, or whether hanging for stealing a leg of mutton was renounced because the hapless thieves demanded it, or because Romilly showed that humanity and the welfare of society and of respect for law required it.

The comely maid, once aroused, would not spare him, and while declining to occupy his son's seat, she would challenge him to say whether the slave-trade was stopped and the West Indian slaves emancipated by England because the slaves petitioned, or because Parliament thought such reforms desirable for the interests of England. That inquiry, doubtless, she would have pushed more closely home, and there would have been no escape for the nimble wit except in some happy and elusive epigram. Nothing would have followed. He would have lifted his hat courteously as the lady smiled and left the omnibus. The stream of logic would have disappeared. But its volume would have been stronger, and when it reappeared, it would have been flowing nearer its goal.

The comely maid recently smiled, probably as if she saw the reappearance, when she learned that venerable Yale, even before venerable Harvard, had opened her post-graduate courses upon absolutely the same conditions to women as to men. This is not co-education; far from it; it is as far as eleven o'clock from twelve. Still less is it co-suffrage. No, indeed; it is as different as the blossom of May from the fruit of September. It means no more than that the good sense of Yale, perceiving that there is a goodly company of women actually devoted to higher studies, and not perceiving anything unwomanly or undesirable in larger knowledge and stricter intellectual training, invites Hypatia and Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitchell to avail themselves of her opportunities and resources to prosecute their studies, and recognizes that in a modern world of larger and juster views, which permits women to use every industrial faculty to the utmost, and to own property and dispose of it, it is useless longer to insist with chivalry that woman is a goddess "too bright and good," or with the Orient that she is a slave in this world and a houri in the next.

As for the logic of such an invitation, Yale is doubtless indifferent. She invites women to study not with her under-graduates, but with her post-graduates. Probably she recoils with instinctive conservatism from the vision of a possible Hypatia seated among her faculty in a professorial chair. That might do in Alexandria in the fifth century. But in New Haven in the nineteenth, or even the twentieth--? She recoils still further from the prospect of covoting. Elizabeth Tudor was a creditable head of a kingdom and a fellow-counsellor of state with Burleigh and Walsingham. But does it follow that a Connecticut woman possessed of great estates should have a voice in the disposition of her property? Probably Yale would agree that when all such amply endowed women unite in asking for such a voice, it might be worth while to consider. Meanwhile she opens the hospitable doors of her post-graduate intellectual treasury, and every woman who will may enter and share the riches.

Oliver asked for more, but not until he had consumed his portion. The comely maid of the omnibus smiles as she sees those treasury doors hospitably opening. She seems perhaps to see the stream of logic at once vanishing and reappearing. If a woman may mingle wisely with post-graduates, why not with under--but no. Something, she would say with womanly good sense, may be left to time and the inevitable sequence of events. Shall all be done at once, and the sound seed be spurned because it must be planted and grow and ripen before there is a harvest? In this Columbian year shall we think that nothing was gained when Columbus reached San Salvador, as we used to be taught, or Watling Island, or Grand Turk, or Samana, among which bewildered knowledge now doubtfully gropes--because he had not reached the continent, and because he believed it to be the old and not a new India?

That comely damsel, with her face towards the morning, says, quietly, with Durandarte, "Patience, and shuffle the cards." One glance at the woman in the Athens of Pericles and at woman in the New Haven of President Dwight answers the question which the nimble elderly wit eluded.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE _GREAT EASTERN_.

I saw the _Great Eastern_ sail away. The afternoon was exquisite--one of the cool, clear, perfect days that followed the storm in the middle of August; and it seemed to hang over the great ship like a cordial smile. But it was the only smile the poor Leviathan received. There was a Christian resignation in her departure. The big ship, like Falstaff, "'a made a finer end and went away, an it had been any christom child: 'a parted even just between" four and five, "ev'n at turning o' the tide." But as when a prince is born, and the bells are rung, and the cannon fired, and the city is illuminated, and with music and shouting the people swarm the streets--and when the same prince, grown to be a bad king and tyrant, dies, outcast and contemned, with never a tear to fall nor a bell to toll for him--even such was the coming and the going of the _Great Eastern_.

I remember also the June afternoon when she arrived, and at the same hour. The city was excited as London used to be by the news of a famous victory. It was reported early in the morning that she was below, and public expectation, which had been feeding upon print and picture of her, was despatching the population to the Battery, to the wharves, to the excursion boats, and wherever she could be seen. At four o'clock you could see, off Staten Island, a pyramid of towering masts above all other masts. She looked a mighty admiral; and as she came up the bay, attended by the little boats--for all other craft are little beside her--you could easily remember the approach of Columbus to the shore and the canoes of curious savages that darted and swarmed around his ship. Her very size gave her a kind of superiority: the silence of her progress was full of majesty.

The shores teemed with people. The heights of Staten Island twinkled and fluttered with the gay toilets of the spectators that covered them. The Jersey shores were alive. The Battery looked white with human faces. The piers upon the river, the decks of vessels in the stream, and the windows and roofs of the buildings that commanded the water, were crowded with eager watchers. But the prettiest sight was the convoy of every kind that attended the surprising guest. Yachts, sloops, schooners, steamers, and tow-boats, large and small, moved down towards her, came out from the shore, sailed round her, sailed beside her, crossed her bows, followed her, so that the bay was bewitched with excitement. Cannon roared, bells rang, flags waved, and the crowd huzzaed welcome.

Through all the great ship glided majestically on. In response to each fresh salute of steam-whistle the bell was touched upon the deck--it was the quiet nod or smile of a prince in reply to the noisy complimenting of a Common Council. There was an air of dignity and of grandeur in the size and movement of the ship; and as the public was not disappointed in her size, but found that she really looked as large as she had been described and represented; and as every circumstance of her arrival was propitious, so that she slipped quietly into her dock, like a ferry-boat--it may fairly be claimed that the _Great Eastern_ had already won the hearty regard of the New York public.

How she lost it--is it not all related in indignant reports and letters and caricatures? How she dared to charge a dollar for admission--how hapless sailors lost their lives--how she went to Cape May--and there black night rushes down upon the tale. After a visit of forty-nine days, in which she had unhappily, but too surely, worn out her welcome, she prepares to depart. But at the last moment petty suits almost detain her. She shakes them off, however, and with them the cables that bound her to our shore. She slips into the stream. She promptly points her head down the bay. It is a lovely afternoon--it is the same river full of craft--there are the wharves, the windows, the roofs--but where, oh! where are the people? She fires her departing gun. A few loiterers, whom chance or business has called to the water-side, look up for a moment as she goes by. Idle boys upon the wharves joke and jeer at her. Where are the wolves, naughty boys? How dare you cry bald-head? Everything in the river and the city slouches in the every-day costume of habit. There are no gala garments, no fluttering flags, and merry bells, and booming guns, and cheering crowds. The _Great Eastern_ is going away--who cares? She will never come back--so much the better! Alas! the poor old King of yesterday is dying, and there is no one to close his eyes. No; the courtiers are booted and spurred to dash away the moment the breath is out of his body and salute the young Prince, the next Sensation, who shall rule the realm for a day.

When she came in I saw her come up the bay. I saw her come down as she departed. In the distance, blending with the spires of the city and the lesser masts, there was the towering cluster rising above all. I listened for the guns. I looked for the attendant craft. There were neither, except a brief salute from the Cunarder in port. But the bay of New York will be watched for many a year before so grand and stately a sight will be seen again as that great ship making her way through the Narrows to the sea. When she entered the bay she seemed majestic and conciliatory; as she left it, she was majestic and disdainful. Yet this was only the impression of a moment and of the distance. As she neared the forts at the Narrows entirely alone, with no accompanying steam or sail vessel, with all the hard luck of her life behind her and following her even to the latest hour of her stay in America, with the fact that she had utterly lost all hold upon public interest made glaringly palpable by the absolute loneliness of her departure, she yet fired a proud salute as she swept out of the upper bay--a stern farewell that echoed coldly from unanswering shores--and with the stars and stripes floating at her peak, magnificent and majestic, the _Great Eastern_ departed.

Gradually, as she passed far down the lower bay, she returned into the same hazy vastness that I remembered when I first saw her--in which, in the memories of all who saw her, she will forever remain.

CHURCH STREET

On the earliest of the really spring-like mornings as the Easy Chair turned into Church Street it could not help perceiving that in some romantic ways the New-Yorker has the advantage of the Londoner and Parisian. Church Street does not, indeed, seem at the first mention to be a promising domain of romance, nor a fond haunt of the Muses. Indeed, it must not be denied that it has an unsavory name; and when the city loiterer recalls Wapping, or a May morning on the Seine quais, he will smile at Church Street as a field of romance, and the Easy Chair grants him absolution. London, perhaps, does not strike the American imagination, or, let us more truly say, the imagination of the travelling American, as a romantic city. That citizen of the world reserves for himself Venice, Constantinople, Grand Cairo. Yet if after his arrival he will buy Peter Cunningham's _Hand-book for London_ at the nearest book-store, and turn its pages slowly, he will discover that for him, an American, he is in a very romantic city indeed. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's _Tower of London_ will show him how copious a sermon may be preached from one romantic text. Of course he can be expected to have no feeling but pity for the unfortunates who fill the streets, and whose fate it was to be born Britishers. Yet, let him reflect that it was not their fault, and except for that precise unhappy fact of being Britishers, which causes all the mischief, their parents too would have lived elsewhere.

Then the American citizen of the world, pitying England, will cross to France, to another country, a new world, and in Paris will breathe more freely as being at last in the metropolis of the globe--always excepting New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, or Chicago, as the case may be. If he opens _Galignani's Guide_, the excellent and well-informed traveller will immediately discover that he is in another romantic city, and that there is something more to see and consider than the bal d'opera, and the Chateau Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a cafe, should chance to ask whether the well-informed traveller had ever taken a romantic stroll in Church Street, New York, he would be rewarded with a smile for his admirable humor. By-and-by, after the coffee was drunk and the pipe smoked out, the Easy Chair and his approving Mentor would perhaps stroll about until they came far away from the haunts of to-day to the respectable old Place Louis Quinze. It is always an attractive spot for that well-informed traveller. He looks at it with pensive emotion, and turns warmly to the Easy Chair and says:

"How delightful this is! Here dwelt the noblesse! This is the Fifth Avenue--what do I say?--the Murray Hill of old Paris! And now all is gone! Fashion is an emigre. Inquire in the Faubourg St. Germain. What a pity we have nothing of this kind in America."

"But we have," replies the Easy Chair.

The incredulous well-informed traveller again smiles a mild, melancholy smile at the inscrutable methods of Providence, which has provided no Place Louis Quinze for the Yankees and aborigines.

"We certainly have," persists the Easy Chair.

"Where, pray?"

"Well, Church Street."

The reply seems to be beating out a jest very thin; but gradually the Easy Chair contrives to explain.

The movement of life in New York is so rapid, fashion and trade sweep from one point to another with such impetuosity, that the romance of changed interest can be enjoyed in the same spot twice or thrice in a lifetime. In older cities, in Paris or London, it is not the individual experience, but history only which covers the change. The gentlemen and dames of the Louis Quinze era do not moralize over the Place from which the glory has departed, but only their descendants. The change is so gradual that it is not within their personal experience. It is a tide that rises and falls once in sixscore years, not in six hours. But the fortunate New-Yorker has his romance making for him while he sleeps. The sorry streets of to-day will disappear within a dozen years, and the instant they are gone, or seen just at the moment of the final lapse, they have passed into the realm of romance.

Here is Church Street, for instance; it is not very long, and you turn into it from Fulton or from Canal. So turned the Easy Chair, and there was the long, narrow vista walled by lofty buildings, the spacious houses of trade, built yesterday, piled with dry goods, bold with prosperous newness, but instantly suggesting the street of palaces in Genoa. And a few rods off some old Knickerbocker is gravely stalking down Broadway who has not turned aside into Church Street for many a year, and who supposes Church Street is still a place not to be named, an unspeakable Gehenna. So it was a dozen years ago. Once, also, it was the Black Broadway. It was a kind of voluntary Ghetto of the colored people. Then, again, it was an offshoot of the Five Points. There were low ranges of dingy buildings. Dirty men and women slouched along on the walks and lounged out of the windows, and their idle, ribald laughter echoed along the street that few carriages travelled. Dens of every kind were just around every corner. Slatternly women emptied slops upon the pavement, and the stench was perpetual. Dirty little children screamed and played, and sickly babies squalled unheeded. It was a street fallen out of Hogarth; the street of worst repute in the city.

And now it is a double range of stately buildings--symmetrical, massive. Horse-cars struggle on it with light carts of dry-goods dealers, with the slow, enormous teams that shake the ground. At every corner there is an inextricable snarl of wagons, and porters are heaving boxes, and young clerks are directing, and huge windows are filled with huge pattern cards, so that the narrow way is tapes-tried. "Look out, there!" cries a porter-compelling clerk to the Easy Chair, which smiles to think that only yesterday it was in Exchange Place, and Pearl Street, and elsewhere that the peremptory youth was ordering him to mind his eye. And if the employer who now sits in the spacious office opposite had known that his clerk was familiar with Church Street, he would have warned him of the gates of destruction, and have admonished him that Church Street, though a narrow street, was a broad way.

The people that push and hurry and skip along this busy avenue are alert and well dressed. The slouchers and loungers, the old slatterns with the slop-pails, the fat, frouzy, jolly, dirty women with bare red arms and loud voices, the sneaks, the thieves, and the unclean groups at the grog-shop, where are they? No sneaks now, no thieves--honorable gentlemen with clean collars everywhere. What a consolation! As you watch the passers closely, as you read the signs, it occurs to you that the population, with the universal tendency in our mental and spiritual habits that Matthew Arnold sparklingly deplores, is clearly Hebraized. Here, where this especially fine warehouse or handsome shop stands, stood the French church. It has jumped up-town a few miles. Here was the church of Dr. Potts. Could you believe that the people who go to meeting in the snug, brown little edifice in an ivy mantle at the corner of University Place and Tenth Street, which probably seems to the young clerk coeval with the city, day before yesterday, as it were, came down here among the merchants? Then they came once a week for an hour or two. What did you say was the name of the deity to whom these temples were dedicated?

And at this corner--why, if it were an April thicket it could not more sweetly bubble with song, only this music is the spirit ditty of no tone--here was the old National Theatre. Do you see that very respectable old gentleman in the office who carries an ostrich egg in his hat? for so his grandchildren describe grandpapa's baldness. He sits and reads the paper, and is presently going down to the bank of which he is a director, and of which he seems always to those grandchildren to smell, so tenacious is the peculiar odor of a bank; that is the very gentleman who in the temple of the Drama upon this spot used to lead the loud applause, and at whom in his buckish costume of those merry days and nights, the lovely Shirreff herself used to level her eyes and her voice as she trilled: "Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad." Can you imagine that excellent grandparent kissing his hand rapturously to the retiring prima donna, going off to sup at the Cafe de l'Independence, and hieing home at two in the morning waking the echoes of Murray Street with a reproduction of that arch song, followed by a loud whistle to prove whether that vision of delight really will come to him, and bringing only the gruff Charley, obese guardian of the night? Will you find in your famous Place Louis Quinze any roisterer of the regency grown old and careful of his diet?

Here is one wall which survives from the prehistoric days of thirty years ago; it is the rear wall of the old hospital, that blessed green spot in the midst of the city, which is to be green no more, but will soon be piled with more palaces. And opposite this wall is a short street running from Church to West Broadway. A few years ago this was one of the worst of city slums. At the corner of West Broadway a wooden building still remains--a sullen, sickly, defiant cur of a building--that sits and snarls impotent over the savagery departed. And there is one tall rookery still, a tenement-house, with a system of fire-escapes in front, and the slattern slopping at the curb as in the ancient day, and a cooper's shop, and a blacksmith's, and one, two, three, how many whiskey shops? But they are all faint and feeble and submerged in the lofty buildings, and to-morrow all trace of them will be gone. And then who will remember the murder? The mysterious, awful, romantic murder. The murder that filled all the newspapers, and fed speculation at all the corner groggeries and in all offices. The murder that was done into a romance, and of which the hero--that is the murderer--was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful truth that he is the hero. Does he sometimes return to this spot? Does he look at the site of the house where the deed was done? Does he appear in the guise of a merchant, a jobber, a retailer from that remote southwestern somewhere, and higgle and chaffer in the noble warehouse on the very site of the wretched building where he murdered his mistress? Good heavens! Do you see that man of about those years, looking about as if to find a sign or number? (As if he didn't know the very place; as if it were not burned and cut into his heart and conscience!) Do you think it could possibly be he, or is it, after all, only the honest Timothy Tape, the modest retailer from Skowhegan or Palmyra?... The typhus-fever used to rage here; the cholera was fearful. The sanitary reports say that there were always cases of the worst diseases to be found here. The city missionaries also used to find their worst cases here too, and now, what cleanliness of collar, what modishness of coat! No more sin; what a consolation!

And so, as the Easy Chair strolled along, bumped and hustled and severely looked upon by the eager throng in the narrow street, more radically reconstructed than any doubtful State, it could not help feeling that London with Her Majesty's Tower, and Paris with her deserted Place Louis Quinze, are not the only romantic cities in the world, and that a city of such rapid and incessant change as New York offers even some poetic aspects which its elder sisters want. The Easy Chair has pleaded formerly for some respect towards old historic buildings, like the old State-house in Boston, for instance, and has been indignantly laughed at for its pains. It will not deny that, unabashed by such laughter, it contemplates the old Walton House with satisfaction. It repairs, also, to the corner of Broad and Pearl streets, and, reflecting upon General Washington's parting with his officers, turns its eyes towards Wall Street, and beholds the Grecian temple which has taken the place of the old City Hall, upon whose balcony the first predecessor of President Grant was inaugurated. But the romance of Church Street is of another kind. It is the romance of striking and sudden change merely, not of historic interest, nor of personal association. Perhaps the gentle reader may not find it when he goes there. Then let him carry it.

HISTORIC BUILDINGS

A few months ago the Easy Chair, seeing that changes were making in the old State-house in Boston, one of the few Revolutionary and truly historic buildings that remain, modestly ventured to regret it, and to deplore the rapid disappearance of the venerable relics that had come down to us from former generations. It suggested, or meant to suggest, or might, could, would, or should have suggested, and will now, under correction, suggest that there are very few buildings in New York which recall that earlier epoch of the country. With a national and pardonable logic, or association of ideas, the Easy Chair enlarged upon the value of historical relics, of monuments, of visible traditions; and urged possibly that it made life a little barer, a little less poetic, here than it would otherwise be.

The temerity of such a strain of remark does not seem very extravagant; it might indeed be put forth without any secret hostility to human rights, to liberty, to the equality of men, and even without a sigh for the repose of effete despotisms, and the traditions of outworn monarchies. But not in the opinion of a certain excellent journal, which we will agree to call the _Bugle of Freedom_, and which blew a sonorous blast and rallying cry against the sentiments of the Easy Chair's mild and innocent suggestions. "Monuments!" blew the _Bugle of Freedom_, "monuments! remains, traditions! Old lumber and rotten timber! What in the name of humanity have all these to do with a manly and patriotic sentiment? Look at Egypt; what have the Pyramids done for the civilization of Egypt? and we hope they are monuments, and ancient enough. Look at Greece; the very queen-mother of the noblest architecture! Look at Italy, teeming with 'storied monuments,' and what do we see?" played the _Bugle of Freedom_. "What do we see? Do we wish to be Egyptians, or modern Greeks, or Italians? Heaven forbid!" And the resounding _Bugle_ seemed to execute roulades and runs and trills of contempt at the unhappy Easy Chair, which was gazing vacantly at Egypt, Greece, and Italy, as the _Bugle_ had directed.

Has the _Bugle of Freedom_ no drawer, or box, or casket of any kind, in which there is, possibly, a yellow rose-bud, faded years and years ago, in the days when it was a mere raw, shrill, piping flageolet? Has it no bundle of letters, worn and parted at the seam; no knotted handkerchief hidden out of sight, that shall never be more unknotted; no glove, delicate and perfumed, still holding the form gained by soft pressure upon a hand that shall never again be pressed. Is there no tree in the garden, in a public square, by the road-side, in a green field by a brook, under which, at every hour of the day and night, whenever and with whomsoever it is passed, there stand a youth and maid who shall be seen of men no more. Is there no house in town or country from whose windows long vanished faces look when the _Bugle_ passes by, and in whose unchanged rooms there are figures of old and young whose presence is infinitely tender and chastening? Would life be richer and better and more manly and inspiring for the _Bugle_ if all these were swept away? Would the rights of man and eternal justice be more secure if some morning Biddy should throw old letters, old rose-buds, and old handkerchiefs into the fire, and the woodman would not spare the old tree, and the haunted old household be burned up or pulled down? That is the whole question.

It is merely a matter of association. It is in human nature; the Easy Chair did not put it there. The mysterious delight in the most ancient and inarticulate remains of human skill is the recognition by the soul of man of its identity and endless continuation; and when you descend from that Cyclopean work in the foundation of the wall of the temple at Jerusalem to the knotted handkerchief and the yellow bud, you have only come, O _Bugle_, to the individual delight in one's own experience, to the unsealing of sweet fountains forgotten, and the quickening of sanitary emotions. Surely when you were travelling and delighting yourselves in Greece you did not come upon the plain of Marathon with the same emotion that you cross the Hackensack meadows in the Philadelphia train. But what was the difference? Byron's lines sang themselves out of your mouth:

"The mountains look upon Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea."

Why did Byron's lines rise in your memory? Why did Byron write the lines? Why was your glance eager and your mind pensive and your imagination alert and your soul full of generous impulse when you stood on the plain of Marathon? Because of the great conflict between two civilizations long and long and long ago--the conflict of ideas of which you are the child; the conflict of men essentially like you and your brothers who fought at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

But if there be this subtle and over-powering influence in association with a place, although it is earth and trees and grass and stone, is there not the same charm and power in association with a building, a tree, a stream? And while Marathon has not saved Greece from decline, has it not been one of the natural influences that have pleaded against national decay? And could Marathon and Salamis and Plataea have been swept out of mind, would not the decline have been a thousandfold hastened? Are we not stronger and braver for Bunker Hill and Saratoga, for the sunken _Alabama_ and the Wilderness?

For the same reason, O loud-blowing _Bugle of Freedom_, that it would be a national injury to forget the great deeds, it is in a lesser degree a misfortune, although an inevitable one, gradually to lose from sight the objects that recall them. Would it be a pity to shovel Bunker Hill into Boston Back Bay? The battle of Bunker Hill would still remain in history, the advantages of the Revolutionary War which it began would still survive; but something we should have lost, and the argument that urged the sparing of the hill would be sound and natural. So with the old State-house. To destroy it or essentially to change it was in a lesser degree to shovel Bunker Hill into the Back Bay.

The town of Stratford-upon-Avon seemed not to be conscious of the great truth which the Easy Chair is expounding when it seemed disposed to let the house of Shakespeare be sold, and even moved away. But England at least was wiser, and the house remains. Some day--and the Easy Chair dedicates the remark as a conciliatory conclusion to the _Bugle of Freedom_--some day the Bugles of that same honored name will gaze at the present printing-office, where a sympathetic Easy Chair trusts the jobs are many and profitable, and will say, with emotion, "There the parental _Bugle of Freedom_ blew its melodious note." It will do the Buglets no harm, as they return to their palatial mansions, to reflect upon the simple and sturdy origin of their prosperity.

The Easy Chair has the more feeling upon this subject because directly opposite to the vast and many-windowed building from which it surveys the world stands the old Walton House. Eighty years ago it was one of the finest houses in town. The Square, where now business hums and roars, then softly murmured with fashion, and this was the Faubourg St. Honore of the republican city. The house still has the stately air of the old regime. The stone pediment of the windows is elaborate and arrests the idle eye. But it is now a sailors' boarding-house. The walls are cracked, and the house has an indescribable aspect of shabbiness and neglect. Surrounded by the mere mob of three-storied modern brick buildings, it has evidently become reckless and lost to shame, like a king's heir fallen into debauched and degraded courses. Long since slighted and forgotten, its peers utterly gone, their descendants moved miles away, and become a modern generation about the reservoir on Murray Hill, the Easy Chair has yet more than once, late on a summer afternoon, when trade had gone up-town, and silence and dreams were setting in, beheld the old Walton House glancing covertly across the street at our modern, many-windowed, bustling palace of busy traffic with a look of high-born haughtiness and contempt. "There may be trade going on within my walls," it seems to say as it gazes, "but I am innocent of it. I was not built for trade, at least." And then the Easy Chair, with its own eyes fixed upon the cracked and leaning walls, seems to see it reeling away into its dingy obscurity.

It is a tradition of Franklin Square that Washington once lived in the Walton House; and it is certain that Citizen Genet married there the daughter of Governor George Clinton. Once indeed, some years since, the Easy Chair, hearing an extraordinary and novel sound like the smooth rolling of a stately chariot, thought, as the day was late and the twilight was already beginning, that some of the fine old societies of that fine old day had somehow forgotten themselves into somehow returning to the scene of so much last-century festivity; and anxious to see both them and their amazement at the transformation of the fashionable square, rolled itself to the window, and, looking out--saw the first horse-car rumbling gravely along to the neighboring ferry.

Remaining at the window, and mindful of Washington at the old Walton House, the Easy Chair was aware of Mercury, who runs the editorial errands and is a much-meditating young messenger, standing by his side with one of the editorial brethren.

"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you know who Washington was?"

"The father of his country," promptly replied the messenger.

"And what did he ever do that was notorious and disreputable?"

Mercury was plainly indignant at this question, and answered, evasively: "Well, he never told a lie, if he did chop down his father's apple-tree."

"And what else did he do?"

With energy Mercury responded: "He whipped the bloody Britishers."

"And what became of him when he grew up?"

"He was President."

"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you see that house across the street?"

"The old Walton House?"

"The old Walton House."

"Of course I do."

"Well, Mercury, he lived there."

"Who lived where?" demanded Mercury, with wide-opening eyes.

"George Washington lived in the old Walton House."

"But not the same George?" asked Mercury, doubtfully. "Not the first President?"

"The first wood-chopper of fame, and the first President," replied the brother quill.

Mercury gazed at the house earnestly for a little while and then warmly demanded, "Why don't they keep his old sign-board up to let folks know?"

_Bugle of Freedom!_ out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the truth proceeds. It was the same instinct that caused the Easy Chair to exclaim a year ago, as it contemplated the prospect of changing the old and famous State-house, "Why take the old sign down?"

THE BOSTON MUSIC HALL

It is not, of course, possible that New York feels any chagrin that Boston has given the most colossal concert ever known upon the continent; but it is observable that, as wind and fire finally levelled the last timbers of the Boston Coliseum in the dust, the first step taken was taken towards the Beethoven Centennial Celebration, in New York. The project is not yet matured; but a vision of something very large indeed, something "metropolitan," begins to allure expectation; and Boston, having scored handsomely in the game, sits upon the ruins of her Coliseum and the profits of her Jubilee to see what New York will do.

If New York will build a proper hall for music and other public purposes, she will do well, and the Beethoven Centennial will not be in vain. The Cooper Institute hall is large enough for political meetings, and Steinway Hall is good for many purposes; but it is not a beautiful nor imposing room, as a great hall should be. The most impressive hall in the country is still the Boston Music Hall, where the great height and the two galleries, one above the other, with the organ and imposing statue of Beethoven, give a feeling of dignity. But the Music Hall lacks one of the chief characteristics of a noble room for the purposes to which it is devoted, and that is brilliancy. It is too dark. There is no smiling splendor of effect, which is always so enlivening. The darkness of the hall may be agreeable to weak eyes, it may even be described as "very much better than a glare of light," but brilliancy remains an indispensable quality of a great hall devoted to popular enjoyment.

Yet, whether dark or light, how much has been enjoyed in that stately room! What memorable figures have passed across that platform! What exquisite strains of music, sung, played, or spoken, have died along those walls! No one who is familiar with our history for the last twenty years will sit in the hall for any purpose but suddenly he sees it crowded with a silent and attentive throng; sees a reading-desk with vases of flowers, and a man[A] of sturdy figure standing behind it, whose voice is deep and penetrating and sincere; whose words are things; who has a certain rustic shyness of movement; but whose sentences roll and flash like volleys of trained soldiery, and who stands in the warmth of his own emotion and the sympathy of his audience, an indomitable gladiator, compelling the admiration even of his enemies as he fights with the Ephesian beasts. Against him, as he stands there every Sunday preaching to that vast multitude what seems to him the truth, and breaking to them what he believes to be the very bread of life, other men are preaching and praying, and the excommunications of the Vatican against Luther, shorn of their thunder and lightning, are hurled. Who is he that judges motives and sincerity? We do not know in this world what is believed, but only what is said and done.

[A] Theodore Parker.

This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him. They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war.

Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent. It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches; to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense--this was not easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better; and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more music!

Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the remembered voice.

"Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"

And as the concert proceeds--one of the series of the Harvard Musical Association, whose concerts are the musical pride of Boston, at which the performance is all of the purest classical music, so pure and so severe that the profane sometimes secretly ask whether melody in music is the unpardonable sin, and are peremptorily answered by the elect: "No, but rub-a-dub-dub and tumti-id-dity are not music"--and as the concert proceeds it is surely a striking spectacle. The great hall, rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture. If, in such a concert, melody is not the unpardonable sin, whispering is. Woe betide the whisperer at a Harvard Musical. It were better for him, or even her, that the money for the ticket had been expended at the minstrels or the museum. You might as well be a forger, a swindler, a perjurer, or a burglar in ordinary life as to be a whisperer at a Harvard Musical. Yes, you might as well "speak right out in meetin'" itself as whisper here.

Such a disciplined audience, so quiet, so attentive, so susceptible to the slightest sigh of the oboe or wail of the violin, is a marvellous spectacle. They are hearing the finest and much of the freshest music in the world. They are not exactly sympathetic; perhaps the character of the music does not permit it. They applaud calmly--as it were, with reservations. It really seems sometimes as though they approve the music rather than enjoy it. But the Easy Chair reflects with pride that the organizer of these concerts, if such a word may be used, and certainly with no exclusion of the co-operation which alone makes such concerts possible, is a Brook-Farmer; and it complacently smiles upon the great multitude as unconscious pupils of that Arcadian influence.

And, indeed, in other days in this same city of Boston, in the halcyon days of the "Academy" concerts at the old Odeon, or still more ancient Boston Theatre, many of the Brook-Farmers were present in the flesh. Those were the days--or, rather, the nights--when Beethoven was truly introduced to America. Preluded with the pretty "Zannetta" overture by Auber, or with the "Serment" or the "Domino Noir," or with Herold's shrill "Zanetta," or some strain which would not now be tolerated in the Harvard concerts, the Fifth Symphony was played until it became familiar. And the long, willowy Schmidt stood at the head directing, proud as a general commanding his column. In the audience, earnest, interested, attentive, sparkling with humor, was Margaret Fuller, not hesitating, when the thoughtless girls whispered and tittered and giggled in the most solemn adagio strains, to lean over when the movement ended and to say to the offenders: "But let us have our turn, too; some of us came to hear the music."