Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/117

Rh fencing match, although with very keen weapons—those of sarcasm and joke—with Senator Hale, of New Hampshire, who, as usual, set the whole house in a roar of laughter. Clay showed himself, however, a master in this art of fencing as well as Hale, but somewhat more bitter. Some of his attacks were so vehemently applauded from the galleries, that the Vice-President, after repeated reminders of silence, angrily said that he should be obliged to clear the galleries if the audience would not attend to his words.

Clay will now leave Washington. The rejection of his Compromise question will cost him dearly. Opposition against him and his bill is strong at this moment; and he stands with his bill just as obstinately against opposition.

I set off in the morning with Miss Dix to Baltimore, where I remain a couple of days on my way to Philadelphia.

I leave Washington; and this phasis of the life of the New World will close itself for ever to me. What have I seen? Anything nobler, anything more beautiful than in the national assemblies of the Old World? No! Have I seen anything new? No! Not at least among the gentleman senators. The new has our Lord given in the world which he created, and upon the new soil of which contests arise, and in the prospects which are opened by the questions between Freedom and Slavery, into regions and amid scenes hitherto unknown, and which are, even now, frequently but indistinctly seen through mists. That which is refreshing and new is in the various characters of the States represented, especially in those of the vast and half-unknown land of the West, over whose wildernesses and paradises many different races of mankind wander, seeking for or establishing homes; in the prospects unfolded by the immense Texas, out of which five States might now be formed, where Rio Grande and Rio Colorado, and innumerable rivers flow through fertile prairies; by New Mexico, with its stony deserts, “el Slano Estuccado,”