FullReads

I had the good fortune on the morning of this first Jubilee day to view the interior of the Coliseum when there was scarcely anybody there,–a trifle of ten thousand singers at one end, and a few thousand other people scattered about over the wide expanses of parquet and galleries. The decorations within, as without, were a pleasure to the eyes that love gayety of color; and the interior was certainly magnificent, with those long lines of white and blue drapery roofing the balconies, the slim, lofty columns festooned with flags and drooping banners, the arms of the States decking the fronts of the galleries, and the arabesques of painted muslin everywhere. I do not know that my taste concerned itself with the decorations, or that I have any taste in such things; but I testify that these tints and draperies gave no small part of the comfort of being where all things conspired for one’s pleasure. The airy amplitude of the building, the perfect order and the perfect freedom of movement, the ease of access and exit, the completeness of the arrangements that in the afternoon gave all of us thirty thousand spectators a chance to behold the great spectacle as well as to hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass.

It was rumored in the morning that the ceremonies were to begin with prayer by a hundred ministers, but I missed this striking feature of the exhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till the last speech was being made by a gentleman whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and whom I suppose to have been intelligible to a matter of twenty thousand people in his vicinity, but who was to me, of the remote, outlying thirty thousand, a voice merely. One word only I caught, and I report it here that posterity may know as much as we thirty thousand contemporaries did of

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

. . . . . . . (sensation.) . . . . . . .
. . . (cheers.). . . . refinement . . . .
. . . . . . (great applause.)

I do not know if I shall be able to give an idea of the immensity of this scene; but if such a reader as has the dimensions of the Coliseum accurately fixed in his mind will, in imagination, densely hide all that interminable array of benching in the parquet and the galleries and the slopes at either end of the edifice with human heads, showing here crowns, there occiputs, and yonder faces, he will perhaps have some notion of the spectacle as we beheld it from the northern hill-side. Some thousands of heads nearest were recognizable as attached by the usual neck to the customary human body, but for the rest, we seemed to have entered a world of cherubim. Especially did the multitudinous singers seated far opposite encourage this illusion; and their fluttering fans and handkerchiefs wonderfully mocked the movement of those cravat-like pinions which the fancy attributed to them. They rose or sank at the wave of the director’s baton; and still looked like an innumerable flock of cherubs drifting over some slope of Paradise, or settling upon it,–if cherubs can settle.

The immensity was quite as striking to the mind as to the eye, and an absolute democracy was appreciable in it. Not only did all artificial distinctions cease, but those of nature were practically obliterated, and you felt for once the full meaning of unanimity. No one was at a disadvantage; one was as wise, as good, as handsome as another. In most public assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search of the vanity of female beauty, and rests upon some lovely visage, or pretty figure; but here it seemed to matter nothing whether ladies were well or ill-looking; and one might have been perfectly ascetic without self-denial. A blue eye or a black,–what of it? A mass of blonde or chestnut hair, this sort of walking-dress or that,–you might note the difference casually in a few hundred around you; but a sense of those myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impression in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman. For the time, one would have been preposterously conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd; you never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way, but unable to distinguish your sensations from those of the mass. If a rafter had fallen and crushed you and your unimportant row of people, you could scarcely have regarded it as a personal calamity, but might have found it disagreeable as a shock to that great body of humanity. Recall, then, how astonished you were to be recognized by some one, and to have your hand shaken in your individual character of Smith. “Smith? My dear What’s-your-name, I am for the present the fifty-thousandth part of an enormous emotion!”