University of Virginia Library

CHANGES IN OUR CITIES.
SUMMERFIELD PREACHING TO THE CHILDREN,
ETC.

On one who has sojourned occasionally in the
different cities of our Union, at different times,
their various and changeful physiognomies (so to
speak) must have made an impression. Cincinnati,
for instance, changes much more than Baltimore.
On returning to Cincinnati, after a five years' absence,
one is more struck with the changes and
improvements than he is in Baltimore after fifteen
years' absence. Yet Baltimore has improved as
rapidly as any city on the Atlantic border, with,
perhaps, the exception of New York. “Well, how
does Cincinnati look to you?” asked a friend of
ours, on a return there, after a five years' absence
in Washington. “Up to Seventh street,” we replied,
“like an old friend with a new coat on; beyond
that like a perfect stranger.” And so it is.

Almost all that portion of Cincinnati called
“Texas” has grown up in that time; crowded
streets, where I saw nothing when I left it but
cow-paths over the common. Walk even down
Main street, and almost all the signs that the
business houses knew a few years ago are broken
down and broken up, like the firms they proclaimed.
So with the private residences, as many a northern
or southern sojourner who has been entertained
there finds out.

In Baltimore, particularly in the heart of the
city, one finds things pretty much as he left them.
We pass down Calvert street, for instance, and
there is Balderston's wire establishment, which
has been there to us time out of mind; and there is
the Mechanical engine-house in the old place, and
a large flagstone in the pavement tells us it was
founded in 1763. What was Cincinnati then? We
have talked with Simon Kenton, “the last of the
pioneers,” who was taken prisoner by the Indians
in the wilderness where Cincinnati now stands. In
New Orleans and St. Louis, how fast all traces of
the French population are fading away! Boston
and Philadelphia hold a good deal of their old
look, we mean of fifteen years ago, for that is old
in our calendar; while Charleston has not changed
much since our childhood, and we are now of a
“certain age.” In Baltimore, the population has
a oneness, an identity of appearance, different from

that of Cincinnati. Beyond the court-house, in
the Queen City, you hear more of the German language,
particularly on Sunday, than of your own,
from the passers by in the streets. Their very
clothes you see were made in the old country, and
scores of them have just arrived. Their friends,
who are walking beside them, and pointing out different
objects with great volubility, as you can see
and hear, have been here only a little while before
them, as some portion of their habiliments, which are
Americanized, show. In fact, the German population
have that part of Cincinnati almost entirely to
themselves. In Louisville, you see comparatively
few foreigners. It has the look of Baltimore.
Louisville, in population and character, resembles
Baltimore. In Baltimore, however, there are fewer
dandies—I mean, fashionable young men; young
men who seem to have nothing to do but to dress
themselves foppishly, and idle about—than in any
other of our large cities. This impression has frequently
occurred to us; and while the Baltimore
women are remarkable for their beauty, the men
certainly are not remarkable for their personal appearance.

We believe that there is more social equality in
Baltimore than in any other large city in the
Union. The mechanic here stands higher, and he
is more conscious of the fact. Many of the highest
public offices here are filled by mechanics. As a

class, here, they are very intelligent, and very independent
in their bearing; none more so. One
is struck, too, with the prevalence of Methodism
in Baltimore. Methodism thrives better in the
South than in the North. Its warm and trusting
faith, so full of sunshine and hope, suits this
meridian, and is compatible with the comparative
equality which prevails here.

You do not see so many negroes in the streets as
formerly, and there are not so many of them slaves.
We have not looked at the census to test this fact;
but to the eye it certainly appears so. If Baltimore
has not her public squares, like Philadelphia,
filled with trees, she has her Monument Squares
and her City Springs, in all of which Cincinnati is
so wofully deficient. The only thing like a public
square in Cincinnati is in Eighth street, if we remember
rightly; and there half the time, in fine
weather, the inhabitants round about are kicking
up a dust in the way of cleaning their carpets.
The dwellings in Cincinnati are extremely neat,
and you see at once that white labor has had the
care of them.

Recurring to Methodism. We go sometimes to
the Light street Methodist Church, whither we
were frequently led, in our boyhood, by our good
old maiden aunt, and where, too, now we are met
by the spirit of improvement, at least in the better
arrangement of the church, if not in the spirit of

the worshippers. The old “bird-nest pulpit” is
removed, and a more modern and roomy one substituted.
And, by-the-by, it has often occurred to
us that those “bird-nest pulpits,” as somebody
calls them, of the olden time, must have been great
foes to the display of eloquence. Perched away off
from the worshippers, the preacher must have felt
himself with them, but not of them; his nearness
to his congregation must have been lessened in
them. We do not wonder that Whitefield preferred
preaching in the open air, with the “heavens for a
sounding-board,” as he said. With all his powers,
he must have felt himself cramped in one of those
pulpits, with the sounding-board, looking like an
extinguisher, raised over his head. “Mother, why
don't they let that poor man out?” said a little
child to his mother, who had taken him for the
first time to a church in which there was one of
those “bird-nest pulpits,” where the urchin
thought the preacher was caged, and, by his eager
gesticulations, in the situation of Sterne's starling.

Light street meeting-house used to be filled on
occasion of worship, and we shall never forget our
good aunt taking us there when a child, to hear
Mr. Summerfield preach to the children. That
saintly apostolic pale face is before us now, after
the lapse of many years.

The body of the church was crowded with children,
of which crowd we formed one. We noticed,

even then, that not a girl played with her neighbor's
ribbon, or her own; and that the boys
entirely forgot their mischief, and were won from
their general listless indifference in church, while
all gazed into the face of the preacher with deep
earnestness. One of his remarks we shall never
forget. It was something in this wise: “Little
children,” he said, “if you were away from home,
and your parents—your father or mother—should
write to you, how eagerly you would open that
wished-for letter, would you not? And how eagerly
you would read every line of it, and how you would
treasure their admonitions, their good advice, in
your memory! You would resolve to do what they
wished you to do—just what they desired. That
you would resolve should be your steady aim, and
again and again you would unfold that letter in
some quiet room, or when you were apart from
your playmates, and read and reread it to yourselves,
that you might know it all by heart, and do
just as they bid you. You would remember how
that dear parent loved you, how much trouble and
anxiety he had felt when you were ill, and how
affectionately he had watched over you! Yes, you
would think of all this, I know you would, for you
look like good children—and you are here in church
to-day, and this is another proof that you are good
children. Yes, you would think so much of that
dear letter. Well, little children, your Father who is
in heaven, your Heavenly Father, has sent you a
letter also, and here it is in the shape of this book
which I hold in my hand, and of which you have
all heard—I mean the Bible.” And so speaking,
he dwelt upon the history of the Bible and the
character of our Redeemer to the children. What
we remember most distinctly, though, is that passage,
and such a manner! Notwithstanding the
improvements in Light street Church, which my
taste could not but admire, we own we longed for
the old appearance of things, that we might call
up the more vividly the spirit of that eloquence,
now gone, which so interested and charmed our
boyhood. We have just been reading Summerfield's
Sermons and Sketches of Sermons, and in
so doing we have been trying to recall his manner
and tones as he stood in that old pulpit, and account
for the effect which he produced in their
delivery, for they are certainly not remarkable
sermons in matter, and we can in a measure realize
their effect. But it requires one, in doing so, to
keep constantly in the “mind's eye” the living,
breathing utterer of them, to their very interjections.

Baltimore is called the Monumental City. It
might also be called the City of Societies. For
scarcely a day passes that some one of these numerous
bodies do not turn out, often, alas, to bury
their dead. But in a country like ours, such societies

(for they are almost all of them of a benevolent
character) do incalculable good in the examples
which they set of temperance and philanthropy.
And as man is a social being, these associations
bring men together without the need of their resorting
to the bar-room, or the theatre, to gratify
a questionable sociability and love of excitement.
There is one kind of association, however, though,
may-be, the most useful of all in our cities, which
is, nevertheless, the source of a great many outrages.
We allude to the different fire companies.
Proverbially, Philadelphia is the city of brotherly
love (on paper), and of firemen's most unbrotherly
riots in fact. They arise in the first place from
emulation among the firemen, but they end, like
emulation in many other places, too often in strife,
bloodshed, and murder.

How often do we hear that a fire company
was outrageously assaulted, in returning peaceably
from a fire where they did good service, when it
is shrewdly suspected that the assaulters were
members of another company, or worse, that the
alarm was raised that they might meet, and
fight. These matters are a disgrace to a civilized
community, and there seems no likelihood
of an end being put to such proceedings. It
strikes us that it would be well if none but appointed
and paid firemen, selected by the authorities,
were allowed to act as firemen; or it would

be well to make all firemen give bonds for their
peaceable behavior at fires, if such a thing were
practicable. Even Washington City was once (we
do not know how it is now-a-days) subject to such
disturbances. We remember, more than once, to
have made our escape in at Fuller's (now Willard's)
window, to get out of the range of brickbats,
which one fire company was hurling at another.
Give us any law but mob law, say we, and almost
any kind of riots rather than those which spring
up between such a useful class of citizens as that
of which our different fire companies are composed.
To see firemen destroying each other's engines,
and taking each other's lives, while a fire is raging,
is about as bad as Nero's fiddling while Rome was
burning.