There was another change–the Forest Park. This was new to me.
It is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit
of having been made mainly by nature. There are other parks,
and fine ones, notably Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens;
for St. Louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier
day than did the most of our cities.
The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six
million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.
It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis,
this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand
into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed
that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems,
of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet there
were reasons at the time to justify this course.
A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or fifty
years ago, said–‘The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.’
Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet;
but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now. The ‘Catholic
New Church’ was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was confidently
called upon to admire it, with its ‘species of Grecian portico, surmounted by
a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmounted
by sundry ornaments’ which the unimaginative Scotchman found himself ‘quite
unable to describe;’ and therefore was grateful when a German tourist helped
him out with the exclamation–‘By —-, they look exactly like bed-posts!’
St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now,
and the little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost its
importance a long time ago. Still, this would not surprise Mr. Murray,
if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of St. Louis
with strong confidence.
The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I
realized how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes in
detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too:
changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity.
But the change of changes was on the ‘levee.’ This time,
a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats
where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones!
This was melancholy, this was woeful. The absence of the pervading
and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained.
He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone,
his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd,
he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous.
Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves,
a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and
soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to
contend!
was desolation, indeed.
‘The old, old sea, as one in tears,
Comes murmuring, with foamy lips,
And knocking at the vacant piers,
Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.’
The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it
well and completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over
our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation.
Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction,
that the bridge doesn’t pay. Still, it can be no sufficient
compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him
out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be.
The pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalks
were rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud.
All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays,
and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone;
and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The immemorial mile of cheap
foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them;
the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in