Here, On The Contrary, I Saw Meadows Tinged
By The Drought With A Reddish Hue, Pastures Grazed To The Roots Of The
Grass, And Trees Spreading What Seemed To Me A Meagre Shade.
Yet the
harvests of wheat, and even of hay, in western New York, are said to be by
no means scanty.
Buffalo continues to extend on every side, but the late additions to the
city do not much improve its beauty. Its nucleus of well-built streets
does not seem to have grown much broader within the last five years, but
the suburbs are rapidly spreading - small wooden houses, scattered or in
clusters, built hastily for emigrants along unpaved and powdery streets. I
saw, however, on a little excursion which I made into the surrounding
country, that pleasant little neighborhoods are rising up at no great
distance, with their neat houses, their young trees, and their new
shrubbery. They have a fine building material at Buffalo - a sort of brown
stone, easily wrought - but I was sorry to see that most of the houses
built of it, both in the town and country, seemed to have stood for
several years.
We visited the new fort which the government is erecting on the lake, a
little to the north of the town, commanding the entrance of Niagara river.
It is small, but of wonderful apparent strength, with walls of prodigious
thickness, and so sturdy in its defences that it seemed to me one might as
well think of cannonading the cliffs of Weehawken. It is curious to see
how, as we grow more ingenious in the means of attack, we devise more
effectual means of defence. A castle of the middle ages, in which a grim
warrior of that time would hold his enemies at bay for years, would now be
battered down before breakfast. The finest old forts of the last century
are now found to be unsafe against attack. That which we have at St.
Augustine was an uncommonly good sample of its kind, but when I was in
Florida, three or four years since, an engineer of the United States was
engaged in reconstructing it. Do mankind gain any thing by these
improvements, as they are called, in the art of war? Do not these more
dreadful engines of attack on the one side, and these more perfect means
of protection on the other, leave the balance just where it was before?
On Tuesday evening, at seven o'clock, we took passage in the steamer
Oregon, for Chicago, and soon lost sight of the roofs and spires of
Buffalo. A lady of Buffalo on her way to Cleveland placed herself at the
piano, and sang several songs with such uncommon sweetness and expression
that I saw no occasion to be surprised at what I heard of the concert of
Leopold de Meyer, at Buffalo, the night before. The concert room was
crowded with people clinging to each other like bees when they swarm, and
the whole affair seemed an outbreak of popular enthusiasm. A veteran
teacher of music in Buffalo, famous for being hard to be pleased by any
public musical entertainment, found himself unable to sit still during the
first piece played by De Meyer, but rose, in the fullness of his delight,
and continued standing. When the music ceased, he ran to him and shook
both of his hands, again and again, with most uncomfortable energy. At the
end of the next performance he sprang again on the platform and hugged the
artist so rapturously that the room rang with laughter. De Meyer was to
give another concert on Tuesday evening at Niagara Falls, and the people
of Buffalo were preparing to follow him.
The tastes of our people are certainly much changed within the last twenty
years. A friend of ours used to relate, as a good joke, the conversation
of two men, who came to the conclusion that Paganini was the greatest man
in the world. They were only a little in advance of their age. If such are
the honors reaped by De Meyer, we shall not be astonished if Sivori, when
he comes over, passes for the greatest man of his time.
The next morning found us with the southern shore of Lake Erie in sight - a
long line of woods, with here and there a cluster of habitations on the
shore. "That village where you see the light-house," said one of the
passengers, who came from the hills of Maine, "is Grand River, and from
that place to Cleveland, which is thirty miles distant, you have the most
beautiful country under the sun - perfectly beautiful, sir; not a hill the
whole way, and the finest farms that were ever seen; you can buy a good
farm there for two thousand dollars." In two or three hours afterward we
were at Cleveland, and I hastened on shore.
It is situated beyond a steep bank of the lake, nearly as elevated as the
shore at Brooklyn, which we call Brooklyn Heights. As I stood on the edge
of this bank and looked over the broad lake below me, stretching beyond
the sight and quivering in the summer wind, I was reminded of the lines of
Southey:
- "Along the bending line of shore
Such hue is thrown as when the peacock's neck
Assumes its proudest tint of amethyst,
Embathed in emerald glory."
But it was not only along the line of the shore that these hues
prevailed; the whole lake glowed with soft amethystine and emerald tinges,
in irregular masses, like the shades of watered silk. Cleveland stands in
that beautiful country without a hill, of which my fellow-passenger
spoke - a thriving village yet to grow into a proud city of the lake
country. It is built upon broad dusty ways, in which not a pebble is seen
in the fat dark earth of the lake shore, and which are shaded with
locust-trees, the variety called seed-locust, with crowded twigs and
clustered foliage - a tree chosen, doubtless, for its rapid growth, as the
best means of getting up a shade at the shortest notice.
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