The Capitol in Spring—A Magic Change—“More Beautiful than Ancient Rome”—Arrival of Visitors—A New Race—“Billing and Cooing”—Lovers at the Capitol—A Dream of Perpetual Spring—Spending the Honeymoon in Washington—Charmingly “Vernal” People—New Edition of David Copperfield and Dora—“Very Young”—Divided Affections: the New Bride—Jonathan and Jane—Memories of a Wedding Dress—An Interview With a Bride—“Two Happy Idiots”—A Walk in the City—Utilitarian Projects—President Grant—The Foreign Ambassadors—“Beau” Hickman—An Erratic Genius—Walt Whitman, the Poet—A “Loafer” of Renown—Poets at Home—Piatt—Burroughs—Harriet Prescott Spofford—Sumner and Chase—Foreign _Attachés_ “on the Flirt”—Tiresome Men—Lafayette Square in the Morning—How to Love a Tree—“He Never Saw Washington.” We rarely have spring in this latitude. Full panoplied, summer springs from under the mail of long lingering winter. We had a fine yesterday. From my window this morning lo! the miracle! my dear long-timed friend, the maple across the street, amazes me once more, though I declared to it last year I never would be amazed again. It beckons me, its myriad little wands all aquiver with the tenderest green, and says: “There now, you can’t help it! Again I am a beauty and a wonder!” No long waiting and watching for slow budding blossoms here. Some night when we are all asleep there is a silent burst of bloom; and we wake to find the trees that we left here, when we shut our blinds on them the night before, all tremulous with new life, and the whole city set in glowing emerald. I invite you to the western front of the Capitol, to stand with me in the balcony of the Congressional Library, to survey the city lying at our feet within the amphitheatre of hills soaring beyond, the river running its shining thread between. I am quite ready to believe what Charles Sumner said when pleading against the mooted depot site on its Central Avenue, that this city is more beautiful than ancient Rome. In itself it is absolutely beautiful, and that is enough; and it grows more and more so as the sea of greenery, which now waves and tosses about its housetops, rises each year higher and higher. The Capitol in early spring and summer is in no wise the Capitol of the winter. Every door swings wide; from the doors in the under-ground corridors to the wondrous doors, designed in Rome and cast in Munich, which open into the rotunda. What long, cool, green vistas run out from every angle. You stand beneath the dome; but your eyes find rest in the far shadow of the Virginia hills.