The subject is important, and will bear repetition.
After an absence, I am now again (September, 1870) in New York city
and Brooklyn, on a few weeks' vacation. The splendor, picturesqueness,
and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpass'd
situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty
new buildings, facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and
elegance of design, with the masses of gay color, the preponderance of
white and blue, the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous
streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever
intermitted, even at night; the jobbers' houses, the rich shops, the
wharves, the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park of hills, (as
I wander among them this beautiful fall weather, musing, watching,
absorbing)--the assemblages of the citizens in their groups,
conversations, trades, evening amusements, or along the
by-quarters--these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy
my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c., and give me, through such
senses and appetites, and through my esthetic conscience, a continued
exaltation and absolute fulfilment. Always and more and more, as I
cross the East and North rivers, the ferries, or with the pilots
in their pilot-houses, or pass an hour in Wall street, or the gold
exchange, I realize, (if we must admit such partialisms,) that not
Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom and the open air,
in her storms, the shows of night and day, the mountains, forests,
seas--but in the artificial, the work of man too is equally great--in
this profusion of teeming humanity--in these ingenuities, streets,
goods, houses, ships--these hurrying, feverish, electric crowds
of men, their complicated business genius, (not least among the
geniuses,) and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry
concentrated here.
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