Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America

by William Cullen Bryant

She is not in tears, but her aspect is that of one who listens in sadness; her eyes are cast down, and her thoughts are of the home of her youth, in the land of Moab. Over her left arm hangs a handful of ears of wheat, which she has gathered from the ground, and her right rests on the drapery about her bosom. Nothing can be more graceful than her attitude or more expressive of melancholy sweetness and modesty than her physiognomy. One of the copies which the artist was executing—there were two of them—is designed for a gentleman in Albany. Brown will shortly, or I am greatly mistaken, achieve a high reputation among the sculptors of the time.

Rosseter, an American painter, who has passed six years in Italy, is engaged on a large picture, the subject of which is taken from the same portion of Scripture history, and which is intended for the gallery of an American gentleman. It represents Naomi with her two daughters-in-law, when "Orpah kissed her, but Ruth clave unto her." The principal figures are those of the Hebrew matron and Ruth, who have made their simple preparations for their journey to the land of Israel, while Orpah is turning sorrowfully away to join a caravan of her country people. This group is well composed, and there is a fine effect of the rays of the rising sun on the mountains and rocks of Moab.

At the studio of Lang, a Philadelphia artist, I saw two agreeable pictures, one of which represents a young woman whom her attendants and companions are arraying for her bridal. As a companion piece to this, but not yet finished, he had upon the easel a picture of a beautiful girl, decked for espousals of a different kind, about to take the veil, and kneeling in the midst of a crowd of friends and priests, while one of them is cutting off her glossy and flowing hair. Both pictures are designed for a Boston gentleman, but a duplicate of the first has already been painted for the King of Wirtemberg.

Letter XXX.

Buffalo.—Cleveland.—Detroit.

Steamer Oregon, Lake Huron, Off Thunder Bay, July 24, 1846.

As I approached the city of Buffalo the other morning, from the east, I found myself obliged to confess that much of the beauty of a country is owing to the season. For twenty or thirty miles before we reached Lake Erie, the fields of this fertile region looked more and more arid and sun-scorched, and I could not but contrast their appearance with that of the neighborhood of New York, where in a district comparatively sterile, an uncommonly showery season has kept the herbage fresh and deep, and made the trees heavy with leaves. Here, on the contrary, I saw meadows tinged by the drought with a reddish hue, pastures grazed to the roots of the grass, and trees spreading what seemed to me a meagre shade. Yet the harvests of wheat, and even of hay, in western New York, are said to be by no means scanty.

Buffalo continues to extend on every side, but the late additions to the city do not much improve its beauty. Its nucleus of well-built streets does not seem to have grown much broader within the last five years, but the suburbs are rapidly spreading—small wooden houses, scattered or in clusters, built hastily for emigrants along unpaved and powdery streets. I saw, however, on a little excursion which I made into the surrounding country, that pleasant little neighborhoods are rising up at no great distance, with their neat houses, their young trees, and their new shrubbery. They have a fine building material at Buffalo—a sort of brown stone, easily wrought—but I was sorry to see that most of the houses built of it, both in the town and country, seemed to have stood for several years.

We visited the new fort which the government is erecting on the lake, a little to the north of the town, commanding the entrance of Niagara river. It is small, but of wonderful apparent strength, with walls of prodigious thickness, and so sturdy in its defences that it seemed to me one might as well think of cannonading the cliffs of Weehawken. It is curious to see how, as we grow more ingenious in the means of attack, we devise more effectual means of defence. A castle of the middle ages, in which a grim warrior of that time would hold his enemies at bay for years, would now be battered down before breakfast. The finest old forts of the last century are now found to be unsafe against attack. That which we have at St. Augustine was an uncommonly good sample of its kind, but when I was in Florida, three or four years since, an engineer of the United States was engaged in reconstructing it. Do mankind gain any thing by these improvements, as they are called, in the art of war? Do not these more dreadful engines of attack on the one side, and these more perfect means of protection on the other, leave the balance just where it was before?

On Tuesday evening, at seven o'clock, we took passage in the steamer Oregon, for Chicago, and soon lost sight of the roofs and spires of Buffalo. A lady of Buffalo on her way to Cleveland placed herself at the piano, and sang several songs with such uncommon sweetness and expression that I saw no occasion to be surprised at what I heard of the concert of Leopold de Meyer, at Buffalo, the night before. The concert room was crowded with people clinging to each other like bees when they swarm, and the whole affair seemed an outbreak of popular enthusiasm. A veteran teacher of music in Buffalo, famous for being hard to be pleased by any public musical entertainment, found himself unable to sit still during the first piece played by De Meyer, but rose, in the fullness of his delight, and continued standing. When the music ceased, he ran to him and shook both of his hands, again and again, with most uncomfortable energy. At the end of the next performance he sprang again on the platform and hugged the artist so rapturously that the room rang with laughter. De Meyer was to give another concert on Tuesday evening at Niagara Falls, and the people of Buffalo were preparing to follow him.