It might have been a recent editorial.  Van Buren was always cartooned as a fox or a rat.  Horace Greeley told me once that he had not had a sound sleep for fifteen years, and he was finally put to death by American politics.  The cartoons of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Cleveland during their election battle, as compared to those of fifty years before, were seraphic as the themes of Raphael.  It was not necessary to go so far back for precedent.  The game had not changed.  The building of our new Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, in 1886, was a game which the politicians played, called “money, money, who has got the money?” Suddenly there was an arraignment in the courts.  Mr. Jaehne was incarcerated in Sing Sing for bribery.  Twenty-five New York aldermen were accused.  Nineteen of them were saloon keepers.  There was a fearful indifference to the illiteracy of our leaders in 1886.  It threatened the national intelligence of the future.

In the rhapsody of May, however, in the resurrection of the superlative beauties of spring, we forgot our human deficiencies.  In the first week of lilacs, the Americanised flower of Persia, we aspired to the breadth and height and the heaven of our gardens.  The generous lilac, like a great purple sea of loveliness, swept over us in the full tide of spring.  It was the forerunner of joy; joy of fish in the brooks, of insects in the air, of cattle in the fields, of wings to the sky.  Sunshine, shaken from the sacred robes of God!  Spring, the spiritual essence of heaven and physical beauty come to earth in many forms—­in the rose, in the hawthorn white and scarlet, in the passion flower.  In this season of transition we hear the murmurings of heaven.  There were spring poets in 1886, as there had been in all ages.

Love and marriage came over the country like a divine opiate, inspired, I believe, by that love story in the White House, which culminated on June 2, 1886, in the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland.  Never in my knowledge were there so many weddings all over the United States as during the week when this official wedding took place in the White House.  The representatives of the foreign Governments in Washington were not invited to Mr. Cleveland’s wedding.  We all hoped that they would not make such fools of themselves as to protest—­but they did.  They were displeased at the President’s omission to invite them.  It was always a wish of Mr. Cleveland’s to separate the happiness of his private life from that of his public career, so as to protect Mrs. Cleveland from the glare to which he himself was exposed.  His wedding was an intimate, private matter to him, and if there is any time in a man’s life when he ought to do as he pleases it is when he gets married.  It was a remarkable wedding in some respects, remarkable for its love story, for its distinguished character, its American privacy, its independent spirit.  The whole country was rapturously happy over it.  The foreign ministers who growled might have benefited by the example of Americanism in the affair.  Even the reporters, none of whom were invited, were happy over it, and gave a more vivid account of the joyous scene than they could have given had they been present.