It is night.  King street seems in a melancholy mood, the blue arch of heaven is bespangled with twinkling stars, the moon has mounted her high throne, and her beams, like messengers of love, dance joyously over the calm waters of the bay, so serenely skirted with dark woodland.  The dull tramp of the guardman’s horse now breaks the stillness; then the measured tread of the heavily-armed patrol, with which the city swarms at night, echoes and reoches along the narrow streets.  A theatre reeking with the fumes of whiskey and tobacco; a sombre-looking guard-house, bristling with armed men, who usher forth to guard the fears of tyranny, or drag in some wretched slave; a dilapidated “Court House,” at the corner, at which lazy-looking men lounge; a castellated “Work House,” so grand without, and so full of bleeding hearts within; a “Poor House” on crutches, and in which infirm age and poverty die of treatment that makes the heart sicken-these are all the public buildings we can boast.  Like ominous mounds, they seem sleeping in the calm and serene night.  Ah! we had almost forgotten the sympathetic old hospital, with its verandas; the crabbed looking “City Hall,” with its port holes; and the “Citadel,” in which, when our youths have learned to fight duels, we learn them how to fight their way out of the Union.  Duelling is our high art; getting out of the Union is our low.  And, too, we have, and make no small boast that we have, two or three buildings called “Halls.”  In these our own supper-eating men riot, our soldiers drill (soldiering is our presiding genius), and our mob-politicians waste their spleen against the North.  Unlike Boston, towering all bright and vigorous in the atmosphere of freedom, we have no galleries of statuary; no conservatories of paintings; no massive edifices of marble, dedicated to art and science; no princely school-houses, radiating their light of learning over a peace and justice-loving community; no majestic exchange, of granite and polished marble, so emblematic of a thrifty commerce;—­we have no regal “State House” on the lofty hill, no glittering colleges everywhere striking the eye.  The god of slavery-the god we worship, has no use for such temples; public libraries are his prison; his civilization is like a dull dead march; he is the enemy of his own heart, vitiating and making drear whatever he touches.  He wages war on art, science, civilization! he trembles at the sight of temples reared for the enlightening of the masses.  Tyranny is his law, a cotton-bag his judgment-seat.  But we pride ourselves that we are a respectable people-what more would you have us?