AMONG the projects in the minds of the founders of the federal city was a monument to celebrate the success of the American Revolution. George Washington personally selected the site for it, due south of the center of the President’s House. Meanwhile the Continental Congress had recommended the erection of an equestrian statue of General Washington, and, immediately after his death, the Congress then in session resolved to rear a monument under which his body should be entombed. But, though resolutions were cheap, monuments were costly, and the project gradually faded out of mind till revived in 1816 by a member of Congress from South Carolina. Still nothing happened, till another generation devised a plan for raising the money by popular subscription without waiting longer for a Government appropriation. The Washington Monument Society was organized with a membership fee of one dollar, so as to give every American opportunity{262} to subscribe. By 1848 a sufficient fund had been collected to spur Congress into presenting a site; and the spot chosen was that marked by Washington for the monument to the Revolution, thus happily combining his plan with the nation’s tribute to himself. Tests of the ground showed that, in order to get a safe footing, it would be necessary to move a little further to the eastward, which accounts for the present monument’s being not quite on the short axis of the White House.

For the original plan of a statue, an obelisk of granite and marble was substituted, which by its simplicity of lines, its towering height, and its purity of color, should symbolize the exceptional character and services of the foremost American. The building fund held out pretty well till a politico-religious quarrel arose over the acceptance, for incorporation in the monument, of a fine block of African marble sent by the Pope; and on Washington’s birthday, 1855, a Know-Nothing mob descended upon the headquarters of the Society, seized its books and papers, and took forcible possession of the monument. The Know-Nothing party ended its political existence three years later, and the monument went back to its former custodians; but the riotous demonstration had checked the orderly progress of the{263} work, and, as the Civil War was imminent, the shaft, then one hundred seventy-eight feet high, was roofed over to await the return of normal conditions. It was not till 1876 that, under the patriotic impetus of the centenary, Congress was induced to co?perate. The work was vigorously pushed from 1880 to 1884; and in the spring of 1885, when it had attained a height of five hundred fifty-five feet and five and five-tenths inches, occurred the formal dedication of the Washington National Monument as we see it to-day.

For the benefit of any one whose pleasure in a masterpiece is measured with a plummet, it may be noted that the Monument falls less than fifty feet short of the Tower of Babel; to him who revels in terms of distance, the glistening pile will appeal on the ground that it is visible from a crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, more than forty miles away as the bee flies. But most of its neighbors in Washington find it for other reasons an unceasing joy. To us it is more truly at the heart of things than even the Capitol. It is the hoary sentinel at our water-gate; or, spread the city out like a fan, and the Monument is the pivot which holds the frame together.

The visitor who has seen it once has just begun to see it. A smooth-faced obelisk, devoid of ornament,{264} it would appear the stolidest object in the landscape; in truth, it is as versatile as the clouds. Every change in your position reveals it in a new phase. Go close to it and look up, and its walls seem to rise infinitely and dissolve into the atmosphere; stand on the neighboring hills, and you are tempted to throw a stone over its top; sail down the Potomac, and the slender white shaft is still sending its farewells after you when the city has passed out of sight. It plays chameleon to the weather. It may be gay one moment and grave the next, like the world. Sometimes, in the varying lights, it loses its perspective and becomes merely a flat blade struck against space; an hour later, every line and seam is marked with the crispness of chiseled sculpture. On a fair morning, it is radiant under the first beams of the rising sun; in the full of the moon, it is like a thing from another world—cold, shimmering, unreal. Often in the spring and fall its peak is lost in vapor, and the shaft looks as if it were a tall, thin Ossa penetrating the home of the gods. Again, with its base wrapped in fog and its summit in cloud, it is a symbol of human destiny, emerging from one mystery only to pass into another. Always the same, yet never twice alike, it is to the old Washingtonian a being instinct with life, a personality to be known and loved. It{265} has relatively little to tell the passing stranger, but many confidences for the friend of years.

To realize all that it is to us, you must see it on a changeable day. Come with me then to the Capitol, whence, from an outlook on the western terrace, we face a thick and troubled sky. The air is murky. Clouds fringed with gray fleece, which have been hanging so low as to hide the apex of the Monument, are folding back upon themselves in the southern heavens, forming a rampart dark and forbidding. Against this the obelisk is projected, having caught and held one ray of pure sunshine which has found an opening and shot through like a searchlight. It is plain that an atmospheric battle is at hand. The garrulous city seems struck dumb; the timid trees are shivering with apprehension; the voice of the wind is half sob and half warning. The search-ray vanishes as the door of the cloud fort is closed and the rumbling of the bolts is heard behind it. The landscape in the background is blotted from view by eddies of yellow dust, as if a myriad of horsemen were making a tentative charge. Silent and unmoved, the obelisk stands there, a white warrior bidding defiance to the forces of sky and earth. As the subsiding dust marks the retreat of the cavalry, the artillery opens fire. First one masked porthole{266} and then another belches flame, but the sharp crash or dull roar which follows passes quite unnoticed by the champion. Then comes the rattle of musketry, as a sheet of hail sweeps across the field.

We are not watching a combat, only an assault, for these demonstrations call forth no response. On the champion—taking everything, giving nothing—the only effect they produce is a change of color from snowy white to ashen gray. Even that is but for a moment. As the storm of hail melts into a shower of limpid raindrops to which the relieved trees open their palms, the wind ceases its wailing, and the wall of cloud falls apart to let the sun’s rays through once more.

The Monument is, of course, only one of many memorials to great men in Washington. We have heroes and philanthropists, poets and physicians, soldiers and men of science, mounted and afoot, standing and sitting. We have horses in every posture that will hold a rider: Jackson’s balanced on its hind legs like the toy charger on the nursery mantelpiece; Washington’s getting ready to try the same trick; Sheridan’s dashing along the line to the lilt of Buchanan Read’s poem; Pulaski’s, Greene’s and McPherson’s, Hancock’s and McClellan’s and Logan’s, walking calmly over the field; Scott’s and{267} Sherman’s watching the parade. The best equestrian statue is that of General George H. Thomas, by Quincy Ward, at the junction of Massachusetts Avenue with Fourteenth Street. Here we have the acme of art in treating such a subject: spirit coupled with repose. The horse has been moving, but has been checked by the rider to give him a chance to look about; they could go on the next moment if need be, or they could stand indefinitely just as they are.

The Scott statue, at Massachusetts Avenue and Sixteenth Street, is good if we take it apart and examine it piecemeal; but the massive rider threatens to break down his slender-limbed steed, which is, by some mischance, of the mare’s build and not the stallion’s. General Sheridan, who used to live within a stone’s throw of this statue, lay while ill in a bedroom commanding a view of it. “I hope,” he remarked one day, “that if a grateful country ever commemorates me in bronze, it will give me a better mount than old Scott’s!” It is hard to find anything new to do with a general officer and a horse without putting them into some impossible attitude. A sculptor who attempts a reasonable innovation is liable to be snubbed for it, as one was not long ago when he offered in competition a statue of General{268} Grant, dismounted, with his bridle swung over one of his arms while he used the other hand to hold his field-glass.

Some of the best-known statues in the city have attracted as much attention by their travels as by their artistic qualities. One of these is Greenough’s colossal marble presentment of George Washington, which visitors to the Capitol ten years ago will recall as standing in the open space facing the main east portico. Greenough was in Italy in 1835, when it was ordered, and spent eight years on its production. It shows Washington seated, nude to the waist, and below that draped in a flowing robe. It weighed, when finished, twelve tons without a pedestal, and required twenty-two yoke of oxen to haul from Florence to Genoa. Peasants who saw it on the way took it for the image of some mighty saint, and dropped upon their knees and crossed themselves as it passed. The man-of-war which was waiting for it at Genoa had no hatchway large enough to take it in, so a merchant vessel had to be chartered for its voyage to America. Arrived at the Capitol, where it was intended to stand in the center of the rotunda, it could not be squeezed through the doors, and the masonry had to be cut away. Then it was discovered that it was causing the floor to settle, and a lot of{269} shoring had to be done in the crypt underneath. Finally, as it was not suited to its place, the masonry around the doorway was ripped out again, and the statue was set up in the plaza, where it remained till 1908, the sport of rains and frosts and souvenir-maniacs, when it took what every one hopes will be its last journey—to the National Museum. The original purpose of Congress was to have a “pedestrian statue” costing, all told, five thousand dollars. What has eventuated is Washington’s head set on a torso of Jupiter Tonans, costing, with all its traveling expenses, more than fifty thousand dollars.

Another peregrinating statue is that of Thomas Jefferson, which stands to-day against the east wall of the rotunda. In 1833 it occupied the center of this room. When Greenough’s Washington was brought in, Jefferson was removed to the Library of Congress, which was then housed in the rooms of the west front of the Capitol. In 1850 it was carried up to the White House and planted in the middle of the north garden. It held that site for twenty-four years and then came back to the rotunda, from which there is no reason to think it will be moved again.

The only parallel to these instances of frequent shifts in the local art world is the case of a painting entitled “Love and Life,” presented by the English{270} artist, George F. Watts, to our Government. Mr. Cleveland, who was President at the time, hung it in the White House, but the prudish comments passed upon it by visitors led to its transfer to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the Roosevelt administration it made three trips, first to the White House, then back to the Corcoran Gallery, and then to the White House again, where it rested till President Taft came in, only to be rebanished to the Corcoran Gallery. President Wilson had it returned to the White House, and there it is at the present writing.

Although there has never been in Washington a definite scheme for the location of statues, which have been planted, hit or miss, wherever space offered, accident has arranged a few of them so as to form a rather remarkable historical series. Starting with the Washington National Monument, in honor of the foremost figure in the Revolution and the President who set in motion the machinery of the embryo republic, we pass directly northward to the White House, home of all his successors in the Presidency and emblematic of the civil government which emerged from the War for Independence. A few hundred feet further northward stands the statue of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, the first fought by the United States as a nation. About{271} a half-mile more to the north we reach the statue of Winfield Scott, the general whose capture of Mexico City ended the second foreign war in which the nation engaged. All that is needed to complete this remarkable procession is a memorial arch on Sixteenth Street heights, to the soldiers and sailors on both sides of the Civil War which cemented the union begun under Washington.

Strange to say, the city which best knew Lincoln and Grant has had, up to this time, no out-of-doors statue whatever of Grant and no adequate one of Lincoln. In Lincoln Park, about a mile east of the Capitol, is the Emancipation statue, and in front of the City Hall there is an insignificant standing figure of Lincoln, perched on a pillar so high that the features can be seen only dimly. A statue of Grant will later occupy the central pedestal of a group in the little park at the foot of the western slope of the Capitol grounds, which it is proposed to call union Square. On either side of Grant, the plan originally was to place Sherman and Sheridan; but as the Sherman and Sheridan statues already set up elsewhere are so diverse in character, it has been questioned whether they would fit into the union Square group. After many suggestions, controversies, and reports, Congress decided, a year or{272} two ago, upon a form of memorial for Lincoln, which is already under way. It will be a marble temple, designed by Henry Bacon, in Potomac Park, with a statue of the War President, by Daniel Chester French, visible in the recesses of its dignified colonnade.

Besides the scores of statues and miles of painted portraits which keep vivid the memory of great and good men who are gone, Washington has many institutions and buildings with personal associations that fulfil a similar purpose. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, for instance, was the gift of the late William W. Corcoran, the financier. The national deaf-mute college at Kendall Green, on the northeastern edge of the city, recalls its original benefactor, Amos Kendall, who was Postmaster-general under Jackson, as well as the work of Doctor Edward M. Gallaudet in raising it from its modest beginnings to its present eminence. The Pension Office, in which eight inaugural balls have been held, takes first rank among our public edifices for architectural ugliness. It is nevertheless an honor to the memory of Quartermaster-general Meigs, who asked the privilege of proving, in an era of extravagance, that a suitable building could be reared for the money allotted to it, and who turned back into the treasury a large slice of his appropriation after having paid every{273} bill. The present Library of Congress is, in a like manner, a monument to the late Bernard R. Green, whose engineering skill and administrative faculty performed a feat corresponding to General Meigs’s; it reminds us, also, of Thomas Jefferson, whose private library, purchased after the burning of the Capitol, formed the nucleus of the present magnificent collection. The Soldiers’ Home, near the north boundary of the city, commemorates General Scott’s success in Mexico, the tribute he exacted there for a breach of truce being used in founding this beautiful retreat, where veterans of the regular army may pass their declining years in comfort.

Few people, probably, are aware that the Smithsonian Institution, whose fame is as wide as civilization, owes its origin to the rejection of a manuscript prepared for publication. ............