Mary Clemmer

“ This lady, flashing by in many hues, represents what one sees continually in Washington—a new woman. Not new to the city merely, but new to position and honor. These are but slight external accidents to a nature that has ripened from within, drawing culture, refinement, and dignity out of the daily opportunities of retired life. But, when the public position is all that gives the honor, how easy to tell it! There is all the difference in the quality of the put-on, puckering manner, and the simple dignity of real ladyhood, that there is between the quality of a persimmon and a pomegranate. ”

“ The lady of the manor in crude Washington revives the stately graces of old days.
How quaint and rare they are! How I look and long for it; how glad I am when I find it,—that indefinable, yet ever-felt presence of fine womanliness, a thing as precious as the highest manliness,—each the rarest efflovescence of human nature. I confess to a clinging adoration for it, whether felt in the lady of the manor or in the sad-eyed woman who cleans my gloves. The womanliness that is not ashamed nor dissatisfied with womanhood, nor yet vain of it ”

“ The whole basement floor of the north wing of the Treasury is occupied by the busy counters of mutilated money. Here sit one hundred and eighty women counters, restorers and detectors. Side by side, we see the faded and the blooming face. Here is the woman, worn and weary—born, more than likely, to ease and luxury—thankfully working to support herself and her children; and at the very next table, a maiden, whose fresh youth, care has not yet worn out—each working with equal thankfulness, to support herself, and besides, perhaps, father and mother, brother, sister or child. ”

“ To every American citizen it is the majestic symbol of the majesty of his land. You may be lowly and poor. You may not own the cottage which shelters you, nor the scanty acres which you till. Your power may not cross your own door-step; yet these historic statues and paintings, these marble corridors, these soaring walls, this mighty dome, are yours. The highest man in the nation owns nothing here which does not belong equally to you. The Goddess of Liberty, gazing down from her shield, bestows no right upon the lofty which she does not extend equally to the lowliest of her sons. ”

“ What a pity that it is beauty’s only dower to so many American women. They waste it, lose it, then wilt and wither. I want you so to feed the sources of life to-day that you may grow, not wither; that you may bloom, not fade, into the perfect flower of womanhood.
Terpsichore is a sad sight to me; not because Terpsichore dances, for dancing in itself may be as innocent as a bird’s flying; not because she loves beautiful attire, for exquisite dress is a feminine fine art, as meet for a woman as the flower’s tint, or the bird’s plumage. ”

“ Nevertheless, in poetry of feeling, in grandeur of conception, in exquisite fineness of detail and in execution, Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington is transcendently the greatest work in marble yet wrought at the command of the government for the Capitol. It is scarcely human, certainly not American, but it is godlike. The face is a perfect portrait of Washington. The veining of a single hand, the muscles of a single arm are triumphs of art. ”

“ We enter a long, light, airy room; and here at a table sit forty or more maids and matrons, counting the new notes. Pretty maidens! Pretty dollars! Our dollar among the rest. Crinkling, fluttering, flying, the dollars! Serene, silent, swift, the maidens! That anything can be counted so rapidly and yet so accurately, defies belief. It is the marvel of this counting, that it is as infallible as it is flying. The fingers of forty women play the part of perfected machinery, the numbered notes passing through them with the celerity and regularity of automatic action. ”

“ Let me tell you, public men, amid all your lavish expenditures of money wrung from the people, never begrudge the price you pay for the fit statue of a great character. Line the corridors of the Capitol with the images of the noble and the good, that, by suggestion and semblance, they may arouse to a purer purpose the emulation of the living. In these halls where lobbyists congregate, where money-changers stand with shameless faces offering their venal price for truth and honor, buying and selling the integrity of manhood, give to our eyes at least the memories of high example. ”

“ It is one of the wonders of Washington too rarely noted—its sky-scenery. So few people take the trouble to look at the sky save to see if “it looks like rain.” All that New York can afford to give to tired mortals is a scanty slice of light through which to let a glimpse of glory down upon its palaces and catacombs of humanity. But across these banding hills, this broad amphitheatre of space, mass and sweep on, in the 163empyrean, wave on wave of polarized light, with a delicacy of tint, a depth of hue, an immensity of volume, which no words can portray. ”

“ In our vast land the passion of nationality has become too much diffused. It has been broken into the narrower love bestowed upon a single State. It has been bruised by faction. It has been broken by anarchy. But within the walls of the Capitol, every State in the Union holds its memories, and garners its hopes. Every hall and corridor, every arch and alcove, every painting and marble is eloquent with the history of its past, and the prophecy of its future. The torch of revolution flamed in sight, yet never reached this beloved Capitol. ”

“ People of sensibility do not wish even to board in a house so haunted with tragic memories of human lives. The house is now used for Government purposes. Its site is so superlative; central to the most interesting objects of Washington, and facing the waving sea of summer-green in Lafayette square. In the march of change its place will soon be filled by some soaring Mansard mansion of the future. But when every brick has vanished, the memories of the old club-house and Seward mansion will survive while any chronicle of Washington endures. ”

“ The zeal of nationality, the passion of patriotism awoke above the bodies of our slain. National songs, the inspiration of patriots, soared toward heaven. National monuments began to rise consecrated forever to the martyrs of Liberty. Never, till that hour, did the Federal city—the city of George Washington, the first-born child of the Union, born to live or to perish with it,—become to the heart of the American people that which it had so long been in the eyes of the world—truly the Capital of the Nation. ”

“ We have newer and dearer shrines, even, than the tomb of Washington; yet, in these soft, summer mornings, many pilgrims turn their faces toward Mount Vernon.
Every morning a large company, including the young and the old, the refined and the vulgar, land at the little wharf below the home of Washington. Fathers and mothers come with their children and their lunch-baskets. Pretty girls come with venerable duennas, and young men come to look at them in spite of their keepers. Lovers come and go, maundering along the lanes, as lovers will. ”

“ But when the President, as the President, comes into the presence of a promiscuous assembly of the people, through whose gift he holds all the honor he possesses,—a citizen uplifted by citizens to the chief magistracy of their government, how false to republican fact is the feeling that perches him up, and hedges him about, with a mock heroic exclusiveness, as if he were a king, or demi-god, instead of a stolid tanner, who fought his way to place and power, conferred on him by a nation of stavers and fighters like himself. ”

“ Taylor, the wife of General Taylor, the twelfth President of the United States, was one of those unknown heroines of whom fame keeps no record. Her life, in its self-abnegation and wifely devotion, under every stress of privation and danger on the Indian’s trail, amid fever-breeding swamps, and on the edge of the battle-field, was more heroic than that ever dreamed of by Martha Washington—or continuously lived by any Presidential lady of the Revolution—yet time will never give her a chronicler. ”

“ Washington was nothing but a place in which Congress could meet and politicians carry on their games at high stakes for power and place. New York was the Capital to the New Yorker, Boston to the New Englander, New Orleans to the Southerner, Chicago to the man of the West. There was no one central rallying point of patriots to the universal nation. The unfinished Washington monument stood the monument of the nation’s neglect and shame. ”

“ The beautiful Treasury building is completed, and a block further on, the click of ceaseless hammers and the rising buttresses of solid stone tell of the new war and navy departments which are swiftly growing beside the historic walls of the old. Even the Washington monument has been taken into hand by General Babcock, to whom personally the Capital owes so much, and by a fresh appeal to the States he hopes to re-arouse their patriotism and insure its grand completion. Flowers blossom on the ramparts of the old forts, so alert with warlike life ten years ago. ”

“ In the press-room, stretching before and on either side of the majestic engine, we see scores of ponderous presses, their swiftly-flying rollers moving with the perfect time of a 524watch—at each revolution clinching the unsullied sheet of paper which, in an instant more, it tosses forth a printed page.
When Benjamin Franklin tugged away at the little printing-press now exhibited at the Patent-Office, an enormous amount of human muscle was needed to perform press-work; but now, without effort and without fatigue, the tireless engine supplies the material power, while women do the work. ”

“ No matter how fiercely the sun burns in the heavens, his fire never penetrates the twilight of this grand hall, whose eight hundred feet measure the length of the Capitol from end to end.
Here, in Egyptian Colonnades, rise the mighty shafts of stone which bear upon their tops the mightier mass of marble, and which seem strong enough to support the world. In the summer solstice they cast long, cool shadows, full of repose and silence. The gas-lights flickering on the walls, send long golden rays through the dimness to light us on. We have struck below the jar and tumult of life. ”

“ Strength and depth are in its foundations, power and sublimity in its dome, and these are ours. Its mighty masses of gleaming marble, all veined with azure; its Corinthian capitals, flowering at the top like a palm in nature; its tutelary statue of freedom, are joys to our eyes forever. Serene Mother of our liberties, she watches always and never wearies. When the whole land lay in shadow, when the blood of her sons ran in rivers, when her heart was pierced nigh unto death, in moveless calm she held her steadfast shield ”

“ A Washington May is the June of the north, with a pomp of color, an exuberance of foliage, an allurement of atmosphere which a northern June has not.
It is May now. All the ugly outlines and shabby old houses are softened and covered with beneficent foliage. Already the mowers are at work in the Capitol grounds and in the little public parks, and the sweetness of the slain grass pervades the atmosphere. The children are everywhere pretty things. Washington is full of them, tumbling amid the flowers and in the dirt. ”

“ It is easier to comprehend the outside than the inside of it. One might as well try to snatch up a city and portray it in a sitting, as even to outline the Treasury of the United States in a single chapter.
It holds a metropolis within its walls. It affords daily employment to over three thousand persons, and thousands more daily throng its halls. Just a glimpse into this vast human hive makes us long for a Dickens to embody the romance and reveal the mysteries of the Treasury. ”

“ But L’Enfant lived and died within sight of the dawning city of his love which he had himself created—and never wrought it, or its projectors any harm through all the days of his life. He was loyal to his adopted government, but to his last breath clung to every atom of his personal claim upon it, as pugnaciously as he did to his maps, when commanded to give them up. He lived without honor, and died without fame. Time will vindicate one and perpetuate the other in one of the most magnificent capitals of earth. His living picture lingers still with more than one old inhabitant. ”

“ In every future work added to the Capitol, let the significant words of Ruskin, the great art critic, be remembered:
“There should not be a single ornament put upon a great civic building, without an intellectual intention. Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things to come. There is no action nor art whose majesty we may not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build a public building, let us think that we build it for ever. ”

“ At his side is the plumed hat of a soldier, and on the pedestal on which he stands are graven words from his last speech in the United States Senate, when he replied to Breckenridge, “There will be some graves reeking with blood, watered by the tears of affection. There will be some privation. There will be some loss of luxury; there will be somewhat more need of labor to procure the necessaries of life. When that is said, all is said. If we have the country, the whole country, the Union, the constitution, free government—with these will return all the blessings of a well ordered civilization. ”

“ I am thankful that Congress appropriated thousands of dollars to repair the Mount Vernon mansion. A mansion in its day, its rooms can bear no comparison with those of modern houses which make no pretensions. The dining-hall is the only one that can claim anything like stateliness or elegance of proportion. The parlors are the merest boxes, each containing one high window. The chamber in which Washington died commands an exquisite view, through the vistas of the grounds, down the Potomac. ”

“ Past the great fountain, tossing its diamonds below, past the sunny knolls and mimic mounds of newly-cut grass, above the bloom-burdened trees and all the tender verdure of early spring and summer, they see the windows of the presidential reception-room, whose doors, through all the winter months, are besieged by an army of office and favor seekers, but which are shut and silent and deserted now, while “the Government” drives among the hills or loiters by the sea. ”

“ From the very beginning the Capitol has suffered as a National Building from the conflicting and foreign tastes of its decorators. Literally begun in the woods by a nation in its infancy, it not only borrowed its face from the buildings of antiquity, but it was built by men, strangers in thought and spirit to the genius of a new Republic, and the unwrought and unimbodied poetry of its virgin soil. ”

“ No painted portrait can give so grand an idea of the great Federalist to posterity. It is eight feet high and represents Hamilton in the attitude of impassioned speech. It is persuasive rather than declamatory, for the lifted hands droop, the face presses slightly forward, the eyes look out from under their royal arches deep and steadfast, while the sunshine pouring down the dome lights up every lineament with the intensity of life. The execution of the statue is exquisite, while in posé and expression it is the embodiment of majesty and power. ”

“ But no soul can put into a statue or painting more than it has in itself. In this statue of Mr. Lincoln we have his rude outward image, unilluminated by one mental or spiritual characteristic. It is mechanical, material, opaque. Mrs. Sarah Ames, in her bust of Lincoln, which stands just behind our friend, “Il Penserosa,” has transfixed more of the soul of Lincoln in the brow and eyes of his face than Miss Ream has in all the weary outline of her many feet of marble. In the bust the lower part of the face is idealized into weakness. Without his gauntness and ruggedness Lincoln is not Lincoln. ”