And rising out of the midst,
tall-topt, ship-hemm'd, modern, American, yet strangely oriental,
V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its
cloud-touching edifices group'd at the centre--the green of the trees,
and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended,
as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven
above, and June haze on the surface below.
HUMAN AND HEROIC NEW YORK
The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn--(will not the
time hasten when the two shall be municipally united in one, and named
Manhattan?)--what I may call the human interior and exterior of these
great seething oceanic populations, as I get it in this visit, is to
me best of all. After an absence of many years, (I went away at the
outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay
since,) again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets, I knew
so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic
Bowery--human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along
the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the
crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day--in
the places of amusement at night--bubbling and whirling and moving
like its own environment of waters--endless humanity in all
phases--Brooklyn also--taken in for the last three weeks. No need to
specify minutely--enough to say that (making all allowances for the
shadows and side-streaks of a million-headed-city) the brief total of
the impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me
comforting, even heroic, beyond statement.
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