Horatio. A truant disposition, good my lord!
Hamlet.
Steaming from Washington to Baltimore is an improvement upon that route at least. “I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and say ‘all is barren;’” was the beneficent dictum of a philosopher as wise as he was witty,—but he never travelled on the post-road from the Monumental city to the capital of the western world. If he had, I fear that precious morceau of pitiful cosmopolitism would have never fallen from his pen.
The locomotive Andrew Jackson whirled us by a series of fields, of which one will serve as a sample. It consisted of about three acres, from the surface of which a few weakly, wilting, pea-green shoots were starting reluctantly upwards, and which nine negroes were trying to make a corn-field of, by dint of most desperate hoeing. Patches of rye and wheat were seen also, at intervals, most forcibly illustrating the condition of Egyptian fields in the seven years of famine of Joseph's time. It was plain that this section of the country, (as Mr. Senator G—— remarked to the representative for the district,) was fit for nothing else than to make rail roads of.
At the end of “The Thomas Viaduct,” a beautiful piece of mechanism, by the way, is the “Viaduct Hotel,” not so beautiful. As we passed, several of the Light Corps of the city [Baltimore] were “standing at ease” by the door of the hotel. They had gone out thither to spend the day of our nation's birth, in drinking mint-julaps, and watching the passing and repassing of the rail road cars. It seemed to be an object with them to discover, as we flew onward, who, of all the grandees who had just concluded those labors which had for seven months been making Washington so famous, were forming a part of our freight. The senator was for stopping the cars, and giving the representative a chance at the stump, before so goodly an array of his constituents. But whether he thought the audience not “fit,” nor “few” enough for such a display, I could not discover—the Colonel declined the proposal.
Commend me to mine host of the Exchange! Page's is the very home of good order, good cheer, good company, and all else that is good,—the very place where one may ask, with a confidence defying negation, “Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?” We found our rooms commodious and airy, and soon saw reason to bless our forethought, in having pre-engaged our accommodations, while compassionating the “potent, grave, and reverend seniors” of the land, as they cubiculated on pallets in the dining-rooms, and were, in some instances, denied the liberty to hang for the night upon a hat-hook! Always engage rooms a week before hand, considerate traveller.
Who shall adequately describe what has so often been dwelt upon by tourists, the distinctive peculiarities of the older cities of the Union? To attempt it were “damnable iteration.” Suffice it therefore to say, that Baltimore has beautiful brick edifices, with pure white marble porches and porticoes—several splendid public buildings, among which none is more deserving of particular mention, inside and outside, than the Unitarian Church, (although Baltimoreans generally “stump” on the Cathedral,) two monuments, one in questionable and the other in unquestionable taste—and upon the whole, neat, clean, orderly, and well-kept streets. She has here and there public fountains, supplied with ever-flowing streams of the purest water,—baths, places of public amusement, (although theatrical entertainments are not much in favor there,) shot-towers, hotels, newspapers, steamboats, rail roads, and pretty women in great abundance. Few cities possess a more refined or more generally diffused taste for music, painting, architecture, and the fine arts in general, than Baltimore. Her present situation, in a commercial and enterprising point of view, is extremely encouraging; and recent legislation in regard to internal improvements will doubtless have a very beneficial effect upon her fortunes.