Studies in the South and West, with Comments on CanadaWarner, Charles Dudley
History
Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada
Warner, Charles Dudley
Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
This social intermingling is significant in itself, and of the utmost
importance for the removal of lingering misunderstandings. They who
learn to like each other personally will be tolerant in political
differences, and helpful and unsuspicious in the very grave problems
that rest upon the late slave States. Differences of opinion and
different interests will exist, but surely love is stronger than hate,
and sympathy and kindness are better solvents than alienation and
criticism. The play of social forces is very powerful in such a republic
as ours, and there is certainly reason to believe that they will be
exerted now in behalf of that cordial appreciation of what is good and
that toleration of traditional differences which are necessary to a
people indissolubly bound together in one national destiny. Alienated
for a century, the society of the North and the society of the South
have something to forget but more to gain in the union that every day
becomes closer.
III.—NEW ORLEANS.
The first time I saw New Orleans was on a Sunday morning in the month of
March. We alighted from the train at the foot of Esplanade Street, and
walked along through the French Market, and by Jackson Square to the
Hotel Royal. The morning, after rain, was charming; there was a fresh
breeze from the river; the foliage was a tender green; in the balconies
and on the mouldering window-ledges flowers bloomed, and in the decaying
courts climbing-roses mingled their perfume with the orange; the shops
were open; ladies tripped along from early mass or to early market;
there was a twittering in the square and in the sweet old gardens; caged
birds sang and screamed the songs of South America and the tropics; the
language heard on all sides was French or the degraded jargon which
the easy-going African has manufactured out of the tongue of Bienville.
Nothing could be more shabby than the streets, ill-paved, with
undulating sidewalks and open gutters green with slime, and both
stealing and giving odor; little canals in which the cat, become the
companion of the crawfish, and the vegetable in decay sought in vain a
current to oblivion; the streets with rows of one-story houses, wooden,
with green doors and batten window-shutters, or brick, with the painted
stucco peeling off, the line broken often by an edifice of two stories,
with galleries and delicate tracery of wrought-iron, houses pink and
yellow and brown and gray—colors all blending and harmonious when we get
a long vista of them and lose the details of view in the broad artistic
effect. Nothing could be shabbier than the streets, unless it is the
tumble-down, picturesque old market, bright with flowers and vegetables
and many-hued fish, and enlivened by the genial African, who in the New
World experiments in all colors, from coal black to the pale pink of the
sea-shell, to find one that suits his mobile nature. I liked it all
from the first; I lingered long in that morning walk, liking it more and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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