When visiting the palace of King Louis XIV of France at
Versailles and the hundreds of rooms that accommodated his
courtiers and their servants, also the two large wings which
housed The State Ministers and contained their offices, you are
greatly impressed at the Herculean labor and immense cost such
magnificence must have required. Here the best artists of his
time, by long years of patient toil, and money in profusion,
were employed on this glorification of a man.
Here was laid out a vast and beautiful garden, filled with noble
statues and marble basins, that extended its geometrical alleys
and lines of symmetrical trees to a park around which spread the
magnificent forest. You see the room in which our great and
illustrious Franklin stayed and marvel at the glorious Hall of
Mirrors where the Peace Conference met. Yet you are glad to get
out and contemplate that wonderful avenue of European elms whose
straight round trunks, bearing innumerable branches which divide
again and again, form glorious fountain-like crests of verdure.
But with what a different feeling you look upon the home of
Washington. Here, too, visitors find in the wonderful trees a
symbol of something serene, protective, sacred, so like the man
who once walked beneath them.
"The dawn of great events in which Washington was to play such
an important part began to blow on the eastern horizon of New
England." From the ocean-bordered shores were faint streaks of
light that ere long began to deepen into hues of a sanguine
color that seemed to presage a tempest. At first the sound was
like the faint lisping murmur of pines along the shore or the
sobbing surf as it retreated from the charge it made; but ere
long it broke forth in loud, angry tones like the wailing of
branches on a stormy night or the booming breakers on the stern
rocks of her rugged coast, until the dwellers of the interior
heard the ominous sound and made ready to defend those
inalienable rights of man, liberty and justice.
The aeolian melodies of freedom were heard by the Master of
Mount Vernon as he walked beneath his liberty loving trees. It
was not easy to leave a charming home where happiness and love
reigned supreme; yet when the call, that echoed from far New
England's rugged shores, rebounded from fair Virginia's hills
Washington sacrificed all the pleasures of love and home on the
altar of Freedom.
We admired the picturesque seed house with its ivy covered walls
and dormer windows, quite as much as the mansion itself. This
was built for the storing of seed and the implements of
horticulture.
We next visited the stately mansion, whose plan as well as that
for all improvements made, were drawn by Washington.
"Convenience and desirability he sought in his home," and last
but not least, location. The mansion is built of pine. It
contains two stories and is ninety-six feet long and thirty feet
wide, having a piazza that is supported by sixteen square
columns which are twenty-five feet in height. The width of the
piazza is fifteen feet, having a balustrade of pleasing design
around it; and in the center of the roof is a circular
observatory from which a wonderful view of the Potomac may be
had. The roof contains several dormer windows. There are six
rooms on the ground floor and on entering the passage way that
leads from east to west through it you are at once impressed
with its wainscoting and large worked cornices which present to
the eye the appearance of great solidity. The parlor, library
and breakfast room are on the south side of the hall; while to
the north are the reception room, parlor, and drawing room. All
of the rooms are what you would expect, "tasteful and charming,
yet simple."
An exquisitely wrought chimney-piece from the finest Sienite
marbles in Italy was presented to Washington for his Mount
Vernon home by Mr. Vaughan, of London. Upon three tablets of the
frieze are pleasing pastoral scenes, so fitting for this rural
home.
We were much impressed by a picture of Washington seen here. How
much more inspiring is a noble human countenance than the
grandest natural scenery.
Any one seeing a crowd of men in which Washington is one of the
number will at once ask, "Whose is the distinguished form
towering above the throng, a figure of superb strength and
perfect symmetry? He at once receives that hearty admiration
which youth and age alike bestow on a man who so forcibly
illustrates and embellishes manhood. No one finds cause of
regret for lavishing it, for that finely formed intellectual
head held a clear, vigorous brain; those fine blue eyes look
from the depths of a nature at once frank and noble; and in that
broad chest beat a heart filled with the love of freedom,
country and his fellow man."
The spirit of the boy pulsating with youth's warm blood who
carved his name on the west side of the Natural Bridge, where it
remained alone for nearly three-fourths of a century - that same
indomitable spirit rose high above the treacherous rocks of
fear, where it shone on the troubled sea of political injustice,
a beacon light to the venturesome mariners, until they were
landed safely upon the shore of Freedom.
Never did a family bear such an appropriate coat of arms: Exitus
Acta Probat, "The end justifies the means." Here we have a man
whose noble life of self-sacrifice and true devotion to his
country accomplished the "greatest end by the most justifiable
means." He had an Alpine grandeur of mind that towered far above
the sordid lowlands of selfish ambitions to those sublime
heights of whole-souled devotion to public duty and
incorruptible integrity, where the great soul of the man shone
forth like the lovely Pleiades on a winter night.
