This scene from the heights is a fascinating one for the day-dreamer. Everything is in harmony with the past character of the capital. Everything is misty, vast, uncertain, grand and ill-defined. One does not see clearly the boundaries--the city and country are one. Every street we trace in the distance, almost every building, almost every foot of ground, has gathered something of tradition from the lives of the statesmen, generals, jurists, diplomates who have lived and wrought here for three-quarters of a century. The visions that passed before the eyes of Washington as he stood on the Observatory Hill there, a subaltern under Braddock, contemplating the wilderness about him and imagining the future; the pictures that filled the fancy of the intractable L'Enfant as he defined the great mall and thought of the gardens between the Tuileries and the Chamber of Deputies; Andrew J. Downing giving his last days to such an arrangement of the trees and grass as would be worthy of the design; President Madison and his cabinet, with a useless little army at their heels, flying in despair from yonder bloody hillside; Admiral Cockburn derisively riding an old mare up Pennsylvania Avenue; the burning Capitol and White House lighting up the gloom of that hideous night; Stephen Decatur shot to death just round the bend of the Anacostia there; the conflicts by tongue and pen that have again and again gone on here till the whole country swayed; Gamaliel Bailey silencing a mob at his door; the histories that lie buried under the thirty thousand headboards that gleam like an army of ghosts among the trees of Arlington; Abraham Lincoln gasping his life away in that little Tenth street house; his assassin dashing in darkness across the bridge at our feet, over which we have just passed, and spurring almost into the shadow of the parapet where we stand;--all these things, and a hundred more as tempting to the dreamer, come crowding on the mind at every glance. Yet who stops to call Washington a romantic city? When the White House, just visible from those tree-tops, shall have ceased, as it soon must do, to be the home of the chief magistrate, what future magician shall summon down those cheerless stairways the ghostly procession of dead Presidents, as our first literary necromancer marshaled the shades of royal governors across the threshold of the Province House? We turn from all this to speak of the practical affairs of to-day which await us in the city, with a reluctance that delays our feet as we descend.