Fair Mount is a beautiful spot; and standing, as it does, just on the skirt of the town, it serves the additional use of a place of pleasant and healthful public resort. The buildings containing the pump-rooms have considerable pretensions to architecture; and the _façades_ and galleries extend along the river, forming a showy object from every point of view, but from the absence of any grand design in the whole, failing of a general fine effect, and presenting what a Londoner would call rather a teagardenish appearance. Steps and terraces conduct to the reservoirs, and thence the view over the ornamented grounds of the country seats opposite, and of a very picturesque and uneven country beyond, is exceedingly attractive. Below, the court of the principal building is laid out with gravel walks, and ornamented with fountains and flowering trees; and within the edifice there is a public drawing-room, of neat design and furniture; while in another wing are elegant refreshment-rooms—and, in short, all the appliances and means of a place of public amusement.
It may as well be remarked here, that this last advantage is less improved in America than it would be in any other country. The Water-works of Fair Mount, though within fifteen minutes’ walk of every citizen’s dwelling in Philadelphia, are (comparatively to its capacities) unfrequented. In several visits made to them in fine weather, we scarce saw more than three or four persons in the grounds; and those seemed looking for other company, more than enjoying the refreshing fountains and lovely prospects around them. As a people, we have no habit of amusement in America. Business and repose are the only two states of existence we know. How far Europeans have the better of us in this respect—how much our morals improve, or our health suffers, from the distaste for places of public relaxation and resort, are questions the political economists have not yet condescended to settle.
[Illustration] VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES BANK, PHILADELPHIA.
This is one of those chaste and beautiful buildings which have given the public architecture of Philadelphia a superiority over that of every other city of our country. It needs but that its fair marble should be weather-fretted and stained, to express perfectly to the eye the model of one of the most graceful temples of antiquity. The severe simplicity of taste which breathes through this Greek model, however, is not adapted to private buildings; and in a certain kind of simplicity, or rather of want of ornament, lies the fault found by every eye in the domestic architecture of this city. The chess-board regularity of the streets, so embarrassing to a stranger, as well as tiresome to the gaze, require a more varied, if not a more ornate style. The hundreds of houses that resemble each other in every distinguishable particular, occasion a bewilderment and fatigue to the unaccustomed eye, which a citizen of Philadelphia can scarcely comprehend.