It is less than a year since General Jackson visited the great towns of the North. He was received with acclamations such as neither America had ever before witnessed. Washington never excited half the enthusiasm; neither Bolivar, Pizarro, nor the great Cortez was ever saluted with such pompous epithets. It was an apotheosis. It is not yet a year since, and already abuse has succeeded to the most extravagant praise. A few days ago, I was grieved to read some unbecoming pleasantries upon the old General's scars. What will be held sacred, if honourable wounds, all received in front, fighting for one's country, are to become a subject of low jests? The war of the President on the Bank was certainly unjust and disastrous to the country; the measures taken in his name against that institution, were impolitic and unauthorised by law; the violent passion and imperious temper displayed by him in the affair, make a strange figure in the seat, that had been occupied by sages like Washington and his successors. All this is true; but when we look back on fifty years of public services, we are filled with grief and indignation to think, that at the end of so long a career, outrage and ingratitude will be, perhaps, his only reward. Can he have been raised so high, only that his fall should be greater? Is he destined to furnish another proof of the instability of popular favour in every age and all countries? But instead of dwelling on these unpleasant reflections, I will rather describe the scene now exhibited literally under my windows.
The town of Lowell dates its origin eleven years ago, and it now contains 15,000 inhabitants, inclusive of the suburb of Belvedere. Twelve years ago it was a barren waste, in which the silence was interrupted only by the murmur of the little river of Concord, and the noisy dashings of the clear waters of the Merrimac, against the granite blocks that suddenly obstruct their course. At present, it is a pile of huge factories, each five, six, or seven stories high, and capped with a little white belfry, which strongly contrasts with the red masonry of the building, and is distinctly projected on the dark hills in the horizon. By the side of these larger structures rise numerous little wooden houses, painted white, with green blinds, very neat, very snug, very nicely carpeted, and with a few small trees around them, or brick houses in the English style, that is to say, simple, but tasteful without and comfortable within; on one side, fancy-goods shops and milliners' rooms without number, for the women[Y] are the majority in Lowell, and vast hotels in the American style, very much like barracks (the only barracks in Lowell); on another, canals, water-wheels, waterfalls, bridges, banks, schools, and libraries, for in Lowell reading is the only recreation,[Z] and there are no less than seven journals printed here. All around are churches and meeting-houses of every sect, Episcopalian, Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, Universalist, Unitarian, &c., and there is also a Roman Catholic chapel. Here are all the edifices of a flourishing town in the Old World, except the prisons, hospitals, and theatres; everywhere is heard the noise of hammers, of spindles, of bells calling the hands to their work, or dismissing them from their tasks, of coaches and six arriving or starting off, of the blowing of rocks to make a mill-race or to level a road; it is the peaceful hum of an industrious population, whose movements are regulated like clockwork; a population not native to the town, and one half of which at least will die elsewhere, after having aided in founding three or four other towns; for the full-blooded American has this in common with the Tartar, that he is _encamped_, not established, on the soil he treads upon.