In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by, the elegant phæton, made of the wood of the old frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a driver’s box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are low, and there are bars for baggage behind; altogether, for lightness and elegance, it would be a turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively beautiful—a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a coat of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capable of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Constitution, under full sail, is painted on the panels.
THE INAUGURATION.
While the votes for president were being counted in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren with courteous significance:—
“It is a cloudy day, sir!”
“The sun will shine on the fourth of March!” was the confident reply.
True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air was cold, but clear and life-giving; and the broad avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large for the thronging population. The crowds who had been pouring in from every direction for several days before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks; and the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange faces. The sun shone alike on the friends and opponents of the new Administration, and, as far as one might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes and parties, I heard no remark that the president would have been unwilling to hear.
I was at the capitol a half hour before the procession arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for which I was not at all prepared. The noble staircase of the east front of the building leaps over three arches, under one of which carriages pass to the basement-door; and, as you approach from the gate, the eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken by a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath. Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corresponding projections; and from the upper platform rise the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of columns three deep extending back to the pilasters. I had often admired this front with its many graceful columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect of the assembled population of Rome waiting to receive the blessing before the font of St. Peter’s, however, the assembled crowd on the steps and at the base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the grandeur of the design. They were piled up like the people on the temples of Babylon, in one of Martin’s sublime pictures—every projection covered, and an inexpressible soul and character given by their presence to the architecture. Boys climbed about the base of the columns, single figures stood on the posts of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against the sky; and the whole thing was exactly what Paul Veronese would have delighted to draw. I stood near an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his subject.
The republican procession, consisting of the Presidents and their families, escorted by a small volunteer corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and Mr. Van Buren were in the “constitution phæton,” drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of the old Chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity from all around it.
I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this imposing drama, till they returned from the Senate Chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and railed in on the broad stair which supports the portico, and, for all preparation to one of the most important and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on earth—for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a republic of fifteen millions of freemen—the whole addition to the open air, and the presence of the people, was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impressive simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the moral sublime was here—that a transaction so important, and of such extended and weighty import, could borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the trumpets of a thousand heralds.
The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear of the columns made way, and the Ex-President and Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass below, and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick-chamber, which his physician had thought it impossible he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read his address to the people. The air was elastic, and the day still; and it is supposed that near twenty thousand persons heard him from his elevated position distinctly. I stood myself on the outer limit of the crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from the interruption near by, his words came clearly articulated to my ear.