THE CITY OF ST. LOUIS.
St. Louis is an immense surprise to visitors from the Eastern States, particularly to those who come round to it from furious and thundering Chicago. It has stolen into greatness without our knowing much about it. If Chicago may be styled the New York, St. Louis is the serene and comfortable Philadelphia, of the West. Having passed through its wooden period to that of solid brick and stone, it has a refined and finished appearance, and there is something in the aspect of the place which indicates that people there find time to live, as well as accumulate the means of living. Chicago amuses, amazes, bewilders, and exhausts the traveller; St. Louis rests and restores him.
The railroad ride of two hundred and eighty miles from Chicago docs not promise much for the city at the end of it. At Springfield, the capital of Illinois, the train bleeds civilization at every pore. Away goes the lawyer who has been solacing himself with Mr. Bancroft's last volume, and away goes every one else almost who appears to be capable of a similar feat. After Springfield, the cars fill with another kind of people,—rough, candid, round-faced simpletons, the sport of politicians, who, on one side of an imaginary line, make them elect Democrats to Congress, and, on the other, fight to destroy their country. What is this we hear? "Give Pemberton as many men as Grant had, and he'd whip him before breakfast." And again, "That Stonewall Jackson of yours was a mighty smart fellow." To which the flattered Southern brother modestly replies, as if to waive the compliment, "He was a very pious man."
It is a strange state of things in a country, when a day's ride transports us to a region which reveres what we laugh at and loathes what we adore. It is strange to travel in one morning, without change of cars, from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth. It is strange to be at 9 A. M. at Abraham Lincoln's tomb and see pilgrims approach it with uncovered head, and at 12 M. to find yourself surrounded by people who affect to hold in contempt all that he represented, without having the slightest understanding of it. Nor less startling is it, after a long ride over unpeopled prairies, attired in the dismal hue of November, to be shot out upon the shore of the Mississippi, in view of a scene so full of novelty and wonder as that which St. Louis presents on the opposite bank. The three railroads which connect St. Louis with the Northern, Southern, and Eastern States, as well as the short lines which run back a few miles to the mines that supply the city with coal, all terminate here; so that the river severs the city from all the noise and litter of the railroads. The bridge, however, will soon send the trains screaming through the town. At present, it requires seven hundred horses, two or three hundred men, and a dozen large and powerful ferry-boats, to convey across this half-mile of swift and turbid water the passengers and merchandise brought to the eastern bank by the railroads.
There is no Brooklyn here. Except a few shanties, there are no signs of human residence in "East St. Louis," as the newer maps term it, or "Illinois Town," as the people name it. There is nothing to be seen there but railroad tracks raised high above the possible swelling of the river, with pools of water between the embankments; a long, tidy station-house of painted wood; and the broad, roughly paved "Levee," steeply slanting to the river. The Mississippi, like Shakespeare, Niagara Falls, the Pyramids, the unteachable ignorance of an original Secessionist, and many other stupendous things in nature and art, does not reveal its greatness all at once. When, however, the stranger is informed, and sees himself
