Chapter 4

_December 21, 1866._--Philadelphia is a most difficult town just now for pedestrians, the door-steps being all of white marble glazed with ice, and sliding on the pavement may be had in perfection. Spent the best part of the day in slipping about, trying to deliver letters of introduction. The system of naming the streets of Philadelphia and of numbering the houses is extremely ingenious, and answers perfectly when you have made yourself acquainted with it; but as it takes an ordinary mind a week to find it out, the stranger who stops four or five days is apt to execrate it. All the streets run at right angles to one another, so that a short cut, the joy of the accomplished Londoner, is impossible. It is a chess-board on which the bishop's move is unknown. Nothing diagonal can be done. The city is ruled like the page of a ledger, from top to bottom with streets, from side to side with avenues. It is all divided into squares. When you are first told this, a vision arises of the possibility of cutting across these squares from corner to corner. Not a bit of it: a square at Philadelphia means a solid block of houses, not an open space enclosed by buildings. When you have wandered about for some time, the idea suggests itself that every house is exactly like the house next to it; although the inhabitants have given up the old uniformity of costume, the houses have not; and without this elaborate system of numbering, the inhabitants of Philadelphia would never be able to find their way home.

Nevertheless, if that is the finest town in which its inhabitants are best lodged, Philadelphia is the finest town in the world. It lodges a much smaller population than that of New York in more houses. In no other large town are rents comparatively so cheap. Every decent workingman can afford to have his separate house, with gas and water laid on, and fitted with a bath.

We have been making a study of the negro waiters. Perhaps cold weather affects them; but the first thing about them that strikes you is the apathetic infantine feeble-mindedness of the "colored persons" lately called niggers. I say nothing of the seven colored persons, of various shades, who always sit in a row on a bench in the hall, each with a little clothes-brush in his hand, and never attempt to do anything; I allude to those who minister to my wants in the coffee-room with utterly unknown dishes. I breakfasted yesterday off dun-fish and cream, Indian pudding, and dipped toast; for dinner I had a baked black-fish with soho sauce, and stewed venison with port wine; for vegetables, marrow, squash, and stewed tomatoes; and for pudding, "floating island."

You see there is something exciting about dinner. After you have ordered four courses of the unknown, and your colored person has gone in the direction of the kitchen, you sit with the mouth of expectation wide open. Sometimes you get grossly deceived. Yesterday F---- ordered "jole," and was sitting in a state of placid doubt, when his colored person returned with a plate of pickled pork. At present I am quite of the opinion of the wise man who discovered that colored persons are born and grow in exactly the same way as uncolored persons up to the age of thirteen, and that they then cease to develop their skulls and their intelligence. All the waiters in this hotel appear to be just about the age of thirteen. There are two who in wisdom are nearly twelve, and one gray-headed old fellow who is just over fourteen.

[Our traveller contented himself in the way of sight-seeing by following Charles Dickens's path to the Penitentiary, and afterwards visited Girard College. He concludes as follows:]

Even in this city of Penn the distinctive marks of Quakerism are dying out. The Quaker dress does not seem much more common in Philadelphia than in any other city, nor do they use the "thee" and "thou" in the streets; but at their own firesides, where the old people sit, they still speak the old language. A Quaker in the streets is not to be distinguished from other Philadelphians. I was talking to Mr. C---- about this, and he said, "Let me introduce you to a Quaker; I am a member of the church myself." L---- was not quite clear whether he was a Quaker or not. His parents had been; his sons certainly were not. Some of the best of the Southern soldiers came from the city of the Quakers. There is a story of a Quaker girl, who was exchanging rings with her lover as he set off to join the army; when they parted she said, "Thee must not wear it on thy trigger-finger, George."

Dined with Mr. L----, the publisher. He showed us over his enormous store, which seemed to be a model of discipline and organization, and described the book-market of America as being, like the Union, one and indivisible, and opened his ledger, in which were the names of customers in every State in the Union. He told us that he had about five thousand open accounts with different American booksellers. His policy is to keep in stock everything that a country bookseller requires, from a Bible to a stick of sealing-wax, so that when their stores get low they are able to write to him for everything they want. He contends, as other Philadelphians do, that New York is not the capital of America, but only its chief port of import, and that Philadelphia is the chief centre for distribution. Mr. Hepworth Dixon had been here not long before, and, as was right and fitting in the city of Quakers, a high banquet had been held in honor of the vindicator of William Penn.

[Thence Mr. Latham went to Baltimore, of which he describes the following old-time experience: "When an American train reaches a town it does not dream of pulling up short in a suburb, but advances slowly through the streets; the driver on the engine rings a large bell, and a man on horseback rides in front to clear the way. Thus we entered Baltimore, arrived at the terminus and uncoupled the engine; and then, still sitting in the railway-car, were drawn by a team of horses along the street-rails to the terminus of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway on the other side of the town." He is talking of antediluvian days. We have reformed all that. After some experience in duck and partridge shooting, and a taste of terrapin soup, he proceeded to Washington. Of his varied experience there we can give but a single out-door example.]

We went this morning over the Capitol, an enormous edifice still in progress; parts of it are continually built on to, and rebuilt, to meet the wants of the legislature. The two new white marble wings are very beautiful and nearly complete, and the dome is on the same scale with them, and of the same material. The centre is now out of proportion since the wings were built, and is of stone, painted white to match the rest in color and preserve it from the frost. If the South had succeeded in seceding it might have sufficed; but now it is bound to grow, and Congress are going to vote the amount of dollars necessary to make the Capitol complete. When completed it will be magnificent.

We are very unlucky in seeing these great marble palaces (for several of the public buildings of Washington are of this material) with the snow upon the ground. Against the pure white snow they appear dingy; under a summer sun they must show to far greater advantage. What ancient Athens appeared like, surrounding its marble temples, I can hardly realize; but the effect of the splendid public buildings in Washington is very much detracted from by the sheds and shanties which are near them. The builders of Washington determined that it should be a great city, and staked out its streets accordingly twice the width and length of any other streets: rightly is it named the city of magnificent distances. But although the Potomac is certainly wide enough, and apparently deep enough, to justify a certain amount of trade, and its situation is more central than that of Philadelphia, the town has never grown to fill the outlines traced for it.

To make a Washington street, take one marble temple or public office, a dozen good houses of brick, and a dozen of wood, and fill in with sheds and fields. Some blight seems to have fallen upon the city. It is the only place we have seen which is not full of growth and vitality. I have even heard its inhabitants tell stories of nightly pig-hunts in the streets, and of the danger of tumbling over a cow on the pavement on a dark night; but this must refer to by-gone times.

One of the most curious and characteristic of the great public buildings of Washington is the Patent Office, in which a working model is deposited of every patent taken out in the United States for the improvement of machinery.

This assemblage of specimens is an exhibition of which all Americans are proud, as a proof of the activity of American ingenuity working in every direction. Capacity to take out a patent is a quality necessary to make up the character of the perfect citizen. Labor is honorable, but the man who can invent a labor-saving machine is more honorable; he has gained a step in the great struggle with the powers of nature. An American who has utilized a water-power feels, I take it, two distinct and separate pleasures: first, in that dollars and cents drip off his water-wheel, and, secondly, in that he has inveigled the water-sprites into doing his work. If you tell an American that you are going to Washington, his first remark is not, "Then you will see Congress sitting," but, "Mind you go and see the Patent Office."

THE NATURAL BRIDGE AND TUNNEL OF VIRGINIA.

EDWARD A. POLLARD.

[The Old Dominion--to give Virginia its home title--is full of natural wonders, some of them unsurpassed in beauty and attractiveness elsewhere in the world. In number and variety of mineral springs it stands unequalled; its caverns, Luray and Weyer's, are rich in charms of subterranean scenery; and its two remarkable examples of nature's grandeur, the Natural Bridge and Natural Tunnel, are unique in their peculiar characteristics. Edward A. Pollard, in his "Virginia Tourist," has ably described the various attractions of the Old Dominion, and we select from this work his word picture of the Natural Bridge. He made his way thither from Lynchburg, _via_ the James River Canal.]

As the traveller enters the gap of the Blue Ridge from the east, the winding courses of the stage-coach carry him up the mountain's side until he has gained an elevation of hundreds of feet above the James River, over the waters of which the zigzag and rotten road hangs fearfully. On every side are gigantic mountains hemming him in; there are black ravines in the great prison-house; and the lengthened arms of the winds smite the strained ear with the sounds of the rapids below. While he looks at the distance, a mountain rivulet, slight and glittering from amid the primeval forest, dashes across his path, and, leaping from rock to rock, goes joyously on its way.

On the North River the scenes are quieter. Emerging here, the traveller sees a beautiful and fertile country opening before him, while still westward the blue outlines of distant mountains in Rockbridge bound his vision. The water landscape is beautiful. Lovely valleys debouch upon the stream; there are peaceful shadows in the steel-blue waters, and on the broad shoulders of the cattle on the banks we see the drapery of the shadows of the trees beneath which they rest. The fisherman standing leg-deep in the water can see his face as in a mirror.

But at present our way does not lie through these scenes. The canal-boat is taking us along the James in the moonlit night, and by the time the day has broken we are within two miles of the Natural Bridge. A rickety team awaits us at the lock-house where we disembark. Through an air filled with golden vapor, and with the mists of the morning yet hanging in the trees by the wayside, we proceed on our journey. The old stage-coach lumbers along under the thick, overhanging boughs of the forest pines, which ever and anon scrape its top or strike in through the windows, scattering the dew-drops in the very faces of the passengers, or perhaps smiting their cheeks with their sharp-pointed leaves.

The first view of the bridge is obtained half a mile from it at a turn on the stage-road. It is revealed with the suddenness of an apparition. Raised a hundred feet above the highest trees of the forest, and relieved against the purple side of a distant mountain, a whitish-gray arch is seen, in the effect of distance as perfect and clean-cut an arch as its Egyptian inventor could have defined. The tops of trees are waving in the interval, the upper half of which we only see, and the stupendous arch that spans the upper air is relieved from the first impression that it is man's masonry, the work of art, by the fifteen or twenty feet of soil that it supports, in which trees and shrubbery are firmly embedded,--the verdant crown and testimony of nature's great work. And here we are divested of an imagination which we believe is popular, that the bridge is merely a huge slab of rock thrown across a chasm, or some such hasty and violent arrangement. It is no such thing. The arch and whole interval are contained in one solid rock; the average width of that which makes the bridge is eighty feet, and beyond this the rock extends for a hundred feet or so in mural precipices, divided by only a single fissure, that makes a natural pier on the upper side of the bridge, and up which climb the hardy firs, ascending step by step on the noble rock-work till they overshadow you.

This mighty rock, a single mass sunk in the earth's side, of which even what appears is stupendous, is of the same geological character,--of limestone covered to the depth of from four to six feet with alluvial and clayey earth. The span of the arch runs from forty-five to sixty feet wide, and its height to the under line is one hundred and ninety-six feet, and to the head two hundred and fifteen feet. The form of the arch approaches to the elliptical; the stage-road which passes over the bridge runs from north to south, with an acclivity of thirty-five degrees, and the arch is carried over on a diagonal line,--the very line of all others the most difficult for the architect to realize, and the one best calculated for picturesque effects. It is the proportions of art in this wild, strange work of nature, its adjustment in the very perfection of mechanical skill, its apparently deliberate purpose, that create an interest the most curious and thoughtful. The deep ravine over which it sweeps, and through which traverses the beautiful Cedar Creek, is not otherwise easily passed for several miles, either above or below the bridge. It is needful to the spot, and yet so little likely to have survived the great fracture, the evidences of which are visible around, and which has made a fissure of about ninety feet through the breadth of a rock-ribbed hill, that we are at first disposed to reflect upon it as the work of man. It is only when we contemplate its full measure of grandeur that we are assured it is the work of God. We have the pier, the arch, the studied angle of ascent; and that nothing might be wanted in the evidences of design, the bridge is guarded by a parapet of rocks, so covered with fine shrubs and trees that a person travelling the stage-road running over it would, if not informed of the curiosity, pass it unnoticed.

But let him approach through the foliage to the side. More than two hundred feet below is the creek, apparently motionless, except where it flashes with light as it breaks on an obstruction in the channel; there are trees, attaining to grander heights as they ascend the face of the pier; and far below this bed of verdure the majestic rock rises with the decision of a wall, and the spectator shrinks from contemplating the grand but cruel depths, and turns away with dizzy sensations. But the most effective view is from the base of the bridge, where you descend by a circuitous and romantic path. Even to escape from the hot sun into these verdant and cool bottoms is of itself a luxury, and it prepares you for the deliberate enjoyment of the scene. Everything reposes in the most delightful shade, set off by the streaming rays of the sun, which shoot across the head of the picture far above you, and sweeten with softer touches the solitude below.

Standing by the rippling, gushing waters of the creek, and raising your eyes to the arch, massive and yet light and beautiful from its height, its elevation apparently increased by the narrowness of its piers and by its projection on the blue sky, you gaze on the great work of nature in wonder and astonishment. Yet a hundred beauties beckon you from the severe emotion of the sublime. When you have sustained this view of the arch raised against the sky, its black patches here and there shaped by imagination into grand and weird figures,--among them the eagle, the lion's head, and the heroic countenance of Washington; when you have taken in the proportions and circumstances of this elevated and wide span of rock,--so wide that the skies seem to slope from it to the horizon,--you are called to investigate other parts of the scene which strain the emotions less, and are distributed around in almost endless variety.

Looking through the arch, the eye is engaged with a various vista. Just beyond rises the frayed, unseamed wall of rock; the purple mountains stand out in the background; beneath them is a rank of hills and matted woods enclosing the dell below, while the creek coursing away from them appears to have been fed in their recesses. A few feet above the bridge the stream deflects, and invites to a point of view of the most curious effect. Taking a few steps backward, moving diagonally on the course of the stream, we see the interval of sky between the great abutments gradually shut out; thus apparently joined or lapped over, they give the effect of the face of a rock, with a straight seam running down it, and the imagination seizes the picture as of mighty gates closed upon us. We are shut in a wild and perturbed scene by these gates of hell; behind and around us is the contracted and high boundary of mountains and hills, and in this close and vexed scene we are for a moment prisoners.

Now let us move across, step by step, to a position fronting where these gates apparently close. Slowly they seem to swing open on unseen and noiseless hinges; wider and wider grows the happy interval of sky, until at last wide open stands the gate-way raised above the forest, resting as it were on the brow of heaven,--a world lying beyond it, its rivers and its hills expanding themselves to the light and splendor of the unshadowed day.

To an observer of both places a comparison is naturally suggested between the Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls in respect of the sublime and the beautiful; and, indeed, as in this respect the two greatest works of nature on this continent, they may well be used as illustrations in our American schools of æsthetics. The first is unique in its aspects of nature like art; it is nature with the proportions of art. In its expressions of power, in its concentration of emotion, as when we look at it distinct or complete, it is truly sublime; and its effect is alleviated (for it is a maxim in æsthetics that the sublime cannot be long sustained) by the picturesque scenery which surrounds it. It is a greater natural curiosity and more wonderful than Niagara, although it lacks the elements of sublimity which the other has in sound, and of the visible, actual struggle in which it displays the powers of nature. Niagara is a living thing, while the Natural Bridge is _monumental_. The first represents the sublime as allied to the terrific,--in contemplating it we are overwhelmed with a sense of our insignificance; while the Natural Bridge associates the sublime with the pleasing and curious, and, not transporting us as violently as Niagara, entertains us more equably, and dismisses us, we think, with more distinct and fruitful perceptions of the grandeur and beneficence and variety of nature which have been distributed in the picture.

[Washington, a century and a half ago, carved his name at a high elevation on the rock walls of the abyss. In 1818 these walls were climbed to the top by James H. Piper, a student of Washington College, Virginia. The narrative here given of this daring feat is from the pen of William A. Caruthers.]

Mr. Piper, the hero of the occasion, commenced climbing on the opposite side of the creek from the one by which the pathway ascends the ravine. He began down on the banks of the brook so far that we did not know where he had gone, and were only apprised of his whereabouts by his shouting above our heads. When we looked up, he was standing apparently right under the arch, I suppose a hundred feet from the bottom, and that on the smooth side, which is generally considered inaccessible without a ladder. He was standing far above the spot where General Washington is said to have inscribed his name when a youth. The ledge of the rock by which he ascended to this perilous height does not appear from below to be three inches wide, and runs almost at right angles to the abutment of the bridge....

The ledge of rock on which he was standing appeared so narrow to us below as to make us believe his position a very perilous one, and we earnestly entreated him to come down. He answered us with loud shouts of derision....

He soon after descended from that side, crossed the brook, and commenced climbing on the side by which all visitors ascend the ravine. He first mounted the rocks on this side, as he had done on the other, far down the abutment, but not so far as on the opposite side. The projecting ledge may be distinctly seen by any visitor. It commences four or five feet from the pathway on the lower side, and winds round, gradually ascending, until it meets the cleft of rock over which the celebrated cedar stump hangs. Following this ledge to its termination, it brought him thirty or forty feet from the ground, and placed him between two deep fissures, one on each side of the gigantic column of rock on which the aforementioned cedar stump stands.

This column stands out from the bridge, as separate and distinct as if placed there by nature on purpose for an observatory to the wonderful arch and ravine which it overlooks. A huge crack or fissure extends from its base to the summit; indeed, it is cracked on both sides, but much more perceptibly on one side than the other. Both of these fissures are thickly overgrown with bushes, and numerous roots project into them from trees growing on the precipice. It was between these that the aforementioned ledge conducted him. Here he stopped, pulled off his coat and shoes and threw them down to me. And this, in my opinion, is a sufficient refutation of the story so often told, that he went up to inscribe his name, and ascended so high that he found it more difficult to return than to go forward. He could have returned easily from the point where he disencumbered himself, but the fact that he did thus prepare so early, and so near the ground, and after he had ascended more than double that height on the other side, is clear proof that to inscribe his name was not, and to climb the bridge was, his object. He had already inscribed his name above Washington himself more than fifty feet.