They Must Sing Wholly Of Their Own
Accord, It Is Of No Use To Bid Them Do It."
"What is remarkable," he continued, "their tunes are all psalm tunes, and
the words are from hymn-books; their taste is exclusively for sacred
music; they will sing nothing else.
Almost all these persons are
church-members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so. Most
of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists."
I saw in the course of the day the Baptist church in which these people
worship, a low, plain, but spacious brick building, the same in which the
sages of Virginia, a generation of great men, debated the provisions of
the constitution. It has a congregation of twenty-seven hundred persons,
and the best choir, I heard somebody say, in all Richmond. Near it is the
Monumental church, erected on the site of the Richmond theatre, after the
terrible fire which carried mourning into so many families.
In passing through an old part of Main-street, I was shown an ancient
stone cottage of rude architecture and humble dimensions, which was once
the best hotel in Richmond. Here, I was told, there are those in Richmond
who remember dining with General Washington, Judge Marshall, and their
cotemporaries. I could not help comparing it with the palace-like
building put up at Richmond within two or three years past, named the
Exchange Hotel, with its spacious parlors, its long dining-rooms, its airy
dormitories, and its ample halls and passages, echoing to the steps of
busy waiters, and guests coming and departing. The Exchange Hotel is one
of the finest buildings for its purpose in the United States, and is
extremely well-kept.
I paid a visit to the capitol, nobly situated on an eminence which
overlooks the city, and is planted with trees. The statue of Washington,
executed by Houdon for the state of Virginia, in 1788, is here. It is of
the size of life, representing Gen. Washington in the costume of his day,
and in an ordinary standing posture. It gratifies curiosity, but raises no
particular moral emotion. Compared with the statue by Greenough, it
presents a good example of the difference between the work of a mere
sculptor - skillful indeed, but still a mere sculptor - and the work of a
man of genius.
I shall shortly set out for Charleston, South Carolina.
Letter X.
A Journey from Richmond to Charleston.
Charleston, _March_ 6, 1843.
I left Richmond, on the afternoon of a keen March day, in the railway
train for Petersburg, where we arrived after dark, and, therefore, could
form no judgment of the appearance of the town. Here we were transferred
to another train of cars. Among the passengers was a lecturer on Mesmerism
with his wife, and a young woman who accompanied them as a mesmeric
subject. The young woman, accustomed to be easily put to sleep, seemed to
get through the night very comfortably; but the spouse of the operator
appeared to be much disturbed by the frequent and capricious opening of
the door by the other passengers, which let in torrents of intensely cold
air from without, and chid the offenders with a wholesome sharpness.
About two o'clock in the morning, we reached Blakely on the Roanoke, where
we were made to get out of the cars, and were marched in long procession
for about a quarter of a mile down to the river. A negro walked before us
to light our way, bearing a blazing pine torch, which scattered sparks
like a steam-engine, and a crowd of negroes followed us, bearing our
baggage. We went down a steep path to the Roanoke, where we found a little
old steamboat ready for us, and in about fifteen minutes were struggling
upward against the muddy and rapid current. In little more than an hour,
we had proceeded two miles and a half up the river, and were landed at a
place called Weldon. Here we took the cars for Wilmington, in North
Carolina, and shabby vehicles they were, denoting our arrival in a milder
climate, by being extremely uncomfortable for cold weather. As morning
dawned, we saw ourselves in the midst of the pine forests of North
Carolina. Vast tracts of level sand, overgrown with the long-leaved pine,
a tall, stately tree, with sparse and thick twigs, ending in long brushes
of leaves, murmuring in the strong cold wind, extended everywhere around
us. At great distances from each other, we passed log-houses, and
sometimes a dwelling of more pretensions, with a piazza, and here and
there fields in which cotton or maize had been planted last year, or an
orchard with a few small mossy trees. The pools beside the roads were
covered with ice just formed, and the negroes, who like a good fire at
almost any season of the year, and who find an abundant supply of the
finest fuel in these forests, had made blazing fires of the resinous wood
of the pine, wherever they were at work. The tracts of sandy soil, we
perceived, were interspersed with marshes, crowded with cypress-trees, and
verdant at their borders with a growth of evergreens, such as the
swamp-bay, the gallberry, the holly, and various kinds of evergreen
creepers, which are unknown to our northern climate, and which became more
frequent as we proceeded.
We passed through extensive forests of pine, which had been _boxed_, as it
is called, for the collection of turpentine. Every tree had been scored by
the axe upon one of its sides, some of them as high as the arm could reach
down to the roots, and the broad wound was covered with the turpentine,
which seems to saturate every fibre of the long-leaved pine. Sometimes we
saw large flakes or crusts of the turpentine of a light-yellow color,
which had fallen, and lay beside the tree on the ground. The collection of
turpentine is a work of destruction; it strips acre after acre of these
noble trees, and, if it goes on, the time is not far distant when the
long-leaved pine will become nearly extinct in this region, which is so
sterile as hardly to be fitted for producing any thing else.
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