Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/494

 policy, as he flies along towards the land of oranges, or turns aside to measure mammoth beets or weigh extra-supernal corn, to "bore" or to "prospect," to pick at oölite and shale or to "peep and botanize" through an inexhaustible Flora. The present writer has certainly reason to be grateful,--not, alas! with that gushing warmth of feeling which the owners of shares or bonds naturally experience,--but as an "'umble individual" who could not have found material for this valuable article, if certain gentlemen who do own the said shares had not been very enterprising.

The man who may be said to have devised the land-basis for railroads through unsettled tracts--a financier of unsurpassed sagacity, and once the soul of commercial honor as well as intelligence--should not, in his dishonored grave, and far beyond the reach of human scorn or vengeance, be denied the credit of what he accomplished before the fatal madness seized his soul and dragged him to perdition. Let it be enough that his name has come to be an epithet of infamy in his land's language. Let not the grandeur of his views, the intent with which he set out, and the good he achieved, be lost in oblivion. Pride--"by that sin fell the angels!"--cast him headlong down the irrecoverable steep,-- "And when he fell, he fell like Lucifer,"--

aye! like Wolsey and Bacon,-- "Never to rise again!"

It is no sin to hope that the All-seeing eye discerned in those noble undertakings and beneficent results the germ of wings that shall one day bear him back to light and mercy. Let us, who benefit by his good deeds, not insist on remembering only the evil!

Chicago, the Wondrous, sits amid her wealth, like a magnificent sultana, half-reclining over a great oval mirror, supplied by that lake of lakes, the fathomless Michigan. Perhaps the resemblance might be unpoetically traced to particulars; for we are told by lotos-eating travellers, that Oriental beauties, with all their splendor, are not especially clean. Certain it is that our Occidental sultana dresses her fair head with towers and spires, and hangs about her neck long rows of gems in the shape of stately and elegant dwellings,--yet, descending to her feet, we sink in mud and mire, or tumble unguardedly into excavations set like traps for the unwary, or oust whole colonies of rats from beneath plank walks where they have burrowed securely ever since "improvements" began. At some seasons, indeed, there is no mud; because the high winds from the lake or the prairies turn the mud into dust, which blinds our eyes, fills our mouths, and makes us Quakers in appearance and anything but saints in heart. Chicago-walking resembles none but such as Christian encountered as he fled from the City of Destruction; yet in this case the ills are those of a City of _Con_struction.--sure to disappear as soon as the builders find time to care for such trifles. Chicago people, it is well known, walk with their heads in the clouds, and, naturally, do not mind what happens to their feet. It is only strangers who exclaim, and sometimes more than exclaim, at the dangers of the way. Cast-away carriages lie along the road-side, like ships on Fire Island beach. Nobody minds them. If you see a gentleman at a distance, progressing slowly with a gliding or floundering pace, you conclude he has a horse under him, and, perhaps, on nearer approach, you see bridle and headstall. This is in early spring, while the frost is coming out of the ground. As the season advances, the horse emerges, and you are just getting a fair sight of him when the dust begins and he disappears again. So say the scoffers, and those who would, but do not, own any city-lots in that favored vicinity; and to the somewhat heated mind of the traveller who encounters such things for the first time, the story does not seem so very much exaggerated. Simple wayfarers like myself, however, tell no such wicked tales of the Garden City; but remember only her youth, her grandeur, her spirit, her hospitality, her w