A stranger visiting the national capital should begin by leaving it. He should cross the Anacostia River at the Navy-yard, climb the heights behind the village of Uniontown, be careful to find exactly the right path, and seat himself on the parapet of old Fort Stanton. His feeling of fatigue will be overcome by one of astonishment that the scene should contain so much that is beautiful in nature, so much that is exceedingly novel if not very good in art, and so much that has the deepest historical interest. From the blue hills of Prince George's county in Maryland winds the Anacostia, whose waters at his feet float all but the very largest vessels of our navy, while but six miles above they float nothing larger than a Bladensburg goose. To the left flows the Potomac, a mile wide. Between the rivers lies Washington. A vast amphitheatre, its green or gray walls cloven only by the two rivers, appears to surround the city. "Amphitheatre" is the word, for within the great circle, proportioned to it in size and magnificence, dwarfing all other objects, stands the veritable arena where our public gladiators and wild beasts hold their combats. This of course is the Capitol, whose white dome rises like a blossoming lily from the dark expanse below.
Along these summits are the remains of a chain of earthworks that completely enveloped the capital. They are all overgrown by verdure, and are fast disappearing; but whenever the site of one is relieved against the clear sky a grassy embrasure or a bit of rampart may yet be seen from a distance. Here stretched
The watchfires of a hundred circling camps,
whose light is in the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic," for it was a personal view of them, and of these altars built in the evening dews and damps, which gave form to the great lyric. Here in a few years, when more of the business-men of Washington shall have learned how to do business, or when her social development shall have detained the cultured and wealthy who now come and go, will be found a circle of beautiful villas and nearly all the luxuries of summer life.
Below the high bank opposite, where the Congressional Cemetery skirts the city, where some famous men are actually buried, and where Congress places cenotaphs that look like long rows of antiquated beehives for all who die while members of that body, a line of black dots crosses the Anacostia like the corks of a fisherman's seine. They are the piles that upheld a bridge in the summer of 1814. On the hills to the right the little army of five thousand redcoats made a feint toward this bridge, and caused the Americans to burn it. Away to the left, across the Potomac, stretches Long Bridge, which was also fired the next night by the British and by the fleeing inhabitants of the captured town.
The eight miles of Virginia shore visible from Washington contain really but three objects. Two or three dark chimneys and steeples and a few misty outlines are all one needs to see of Alexandria, which is six miles down the river, and appears about as ancient as its Egyptian namesake. Nearer, the monotony is broken by the tower of Fairfax Seminary; nearer still, among the oaks of Arlington, by the mansion of Custis-Lee, imposing, pillared and cream-colored; or it was the last in the days when cream had a color.
Descending from the old fort, the stranger should go at once to Georgetown and climb up into the little burying-ground of Holyrood. The view thence will give him all that was excluded from the other. He will now be prepared to examine Washington in detail, and as this is not a guide-book he shall go his way alone. But the "gentle reader" is requested to linger an hour longer upon the natural walls and look down with me on the dark city.
Below is such a growth of beautiful and strange that we can understand it only by remembering that we look down on all the United States. Into that problem of squares and circles and triangles wise men from the East plunge and see Beacon street; wise men from the West plunge and see Poker Flat; and from the highest ground we can find we will try to see the whole of Washington. We cannot distinguish a friend's house from an enemy's. The lines are mingled and the colors blended by our distance. Individuals are lost to sight entirely. What would be such a conflict of sounds down there that we should never be certain of what we heard, is now so faint a hum that it does not disturb us or affect our speech. We have risen into a better atmosphere, and find that some things which were ugly have grown good and graceful.
To allude to all the noted and novel things in this complicated scene would be to fill a book, and enough pre-Raphaelites are already browsing there. Giving due attention to particulars in their places, we must yet give effects in sweeping strokes, steering as best we can between the Scylla of didactic details and the Charybdis of glittering generalities.
The candid observer wonders not that Washington is so far below what it ought to be, but that it exists as a city at all. It has suffered calamities that would have extinguished any other place. The vitality that could survive them would seem capable of surviving anything. Other towns have had to contend against natural disadvantages, but they have had the aid of citizens who knew what they wanted, and who used the public money and energy and brains for the public good. But here has been the novel sight of a city having every natural advantage, yet compelled to fight its own citizens for life; to see the public money and energy and brains—what little there were—used to kill not only the town, but the people in it; to support men of weight in the community who really did not want it polluted by trade or manufactures or any such vulgar things.