l the twinkle of scattered groups of
light; you see, far off, the long row of the Treasury columns half
lost in darkness, and you will remember pictured scenes of bivouacs
among the ruins of Baalbec. And if it is in the morning that you
arrive, fresh from the turbulence of Broadway, from the quaint and
tortuous hillside lanes of Boston, from the elegant monotony
of Philadelphia, the impression made upon you is still not very
different. Though you are in the heart of the place, it seems to lie
before you like a city in the distance. Now the mist is stripped away
from some massive marble pile; now a prospect opens of river and wood
and the pillared heights of Arlington; now a lofty heaven reveals
a waning moon, it may be--for every square has its horizon--the
morning-star flames out, a red and yellow sunrise burns behind the
silver cloud of the Capitol dome, and the whole city, in its splendor
and its squalor, bared to view, gives you a suffocating sense of the
pettiness of all other places before the opulence of sky, the width
and height, the light and space and air, that Washington affords.

The concentric labyrinth of the city's plan is indeed something
altogether unique; but whether it owes its origin to the fear of the
old French barricade or to a desire for grandeur and scope, the effect
attained is the same one of airy magnificence--monstrous avenues
crossing the right angles of the streets in diagonals radiating from
the White House and the Capitol, and all tiresomeness prevented by
the accommodating way which these avenues have of turning out for any
edifice that fancies their situation; while to keep upon them you are
so perpetually crossing one street or losing your way down another
that you may almost imagine yourself a spider walking across a web.

The designer of all this must have had a city in his mind's eye that
rivaled Napoleon's Paris--buildings, monuments, marbles, fountains,
trees, and everywhere great spaces and shining skies. For years,
though, this visionary city has existed only among the castles of the
air, and it is within a little while that the District government has
begun to put in a substantial underpinning to the cloudy fabric. But
although wretched thoroughfares and dilapidated dwellings, until the
last decade, have characterized the place, the fine public buildings
have for a long while awaited their fit surroundings--buildings mostly
of the Grecian types, which, however unfit they migh