side of the Atlantic. The
Capitol comes next, though it can scarce be ranked, relatively, as
high. As for the White House, it is every way sufficient for its
purposes and the institutions; and now that its grounds are finished,
and the shrubbery and trees begin to tell, one sees about it something
that is not unworthy of its high uses and origin. Those grounds,
which so long lay a reproach to the national taste and liberality, are
now fast becoming beautiful, are already exceedingly pretty, and give
to a structure that is destined to become historical, having already
associated with it the names of Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and
Quincy Adams, together with the _ci polloi_ of the later Presidents,
an _entourage_ that is suitable to its past recollections and its
present purposes. They are not quite on a level with the parks of
London, it is true; or even with the Tuileries, or Luxembourg, or the
Boboli, or the Villa Reale, or fifty more grounds and gardens, of a
similar nature, that might be mentioned; but, seen in the spring and
early summer, they adorn the building they surround, and lend to the
whole neighborhood a character of high civilization, that no other
place in America can show, in precisely the same form, or to the same
extent.

This much have we said on the subject of the White House and its
precincts, because we took occasion, in a former work, to berate the
narrow-minded parsimony which left the grounds of the White House in a
condition that was discreditable to the republic. How far our
philippic may have hastened the improvements which have been made, is
more than we shall pretend to say, but having made the former
strictures, we are happy to have an occasion to say (though nearly
twenty years have intervened between the expressions of the two
opinions) that they are no longer merited.

And here we will add another word, and that on a subject that is not
sufficiently pressed on the attention of a people, who, by position,
are unavoidably provincial. We invite those whose gorges rise at any
stricture on any thing American, and who fancy it is enough to belong
to the great republic to be great in itself, to place themselves in
front of the State Department, as it now stands, and to examine its
dimensions, material and form with critical eyes; then to look along
the adjacent Treasury Buildings, to fancy them completed, by a
junction with new edifices of a similar construction to contain the
department