f 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-