From Charleston the travellers came north by rail-road.  Harry made several stops by the way, in order to divert the thoughts of his beautiful young bride from dwelling too much on the fate of her aunt.  He knew that home would revive all these recollections painfully, and wished to put off the hour of their return, until time had a little weakened Rose’s regrets.  For this reason, he passed a whole week in Washington, though it was a season of the year that the place is not in much request.  Still, Washington is scarce a town, at any season.  It is much the fashion to deride the American capital, and to treat it as a place of very humble performance with very sounding pretensions.  Certainly, Washington has very few of the peculiarities of a great European capital, but few as these are, they are more than belong to any other place in this country.  We now allude to the distinctive characteristics of a capital, and not to a mere concentration of houses and shops within a given space.  In this last respect, Washington is much behind fifty other American towns, even while it is the only place in the whole republic which possesses specimens of architecture, on a scale approaching that of the higher classes of the edifices of the old world.  It is totally deficient in churches, and theatres, and markets; or those it does possess are, in an architectural sense, not at all above the level of village or countrytown pretensions, but one or two of its national edifices do approach the magnificence and grandeur of the old world.  The new Treasury Buildings are unquestionably, on the score of size, embellishments and finish, the American edifice that comes nearest to first class architecture on the other side of the Atlantic.  The Capitol comes next, though it can scarce be ranked, relatively, as high.  As for the White House, it is every way sufficient for its purposes and the institutions; and now that its grounds are finished, and the shrubbery and trees begin to tell, one sees about it something that is not unworthy of its high uses and origin.  Those grounds, which so long lay a reproach to the national taste and liberality, are now fast becoming beautiful, are already exceedingly pretty, and give to a structure that is destined to become historical, having already associated with it the names of Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and Quincy Adams, together with the ci polloi of the later Presidents, an entourage that is suitable to its past recollections and its present purposes.  They are not quite on a level with the parks of London, it is true; or even with the Tuileries, or Luxembourg, or the Boboli, or the Villa Reale, or fifty more grounds and gardens, of a similar nature, that might be mentioned; but, seen in the spring and early summer, they adorn the building they surround, and lend to the whole neighbourhood a character of high civilization, that no other place in America can show, in precisely the same form, or to the same extent.