Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/727

1866.] excavation which betrays the Croton pipes, a sublime consciousness is awakened of the relation of this swift and populous eddy of life's great ocean to its distant rural streams, and the ebb and flow of humanity's eternal tide. Consider, too, the representative economics and delectations around, available to taste, necessity, and cash,—how wonderful their contrast! Not long since, an Egyptian museum, with relics dating from the Pharaohs, was accessible to the Broadway philosopher, and a Turkish khan to the sybarite; one has but to mount a staircase, and find himself in the presence of authentic effigies of all the prominent men of the nation, sun-painted for the million. This pharmacist will exorcise his pain-demon; that electrician place him en rapport with kindred hundreds of miles away, or fortify his jaded nerves. Down this street he may enjoy a Russian or Turkish bath; down that, a water-cure. Here, with skill undreamed of by civilized antiquity, fine gold can be made to replace the decayed segment of a tooth; there, he has but to stretch out his foot, and a chiropodist removes the throbbing bunion, or a boy kneels to polish his boots. A hackman is at hand to drive him to the Park, a telescope to show him the stars; he has but to pause at a corner and buy a journal which will place him au Courant with the events of the world, or listen to an organ-grinder, and think himself at the opera. This temple is free for him to enter and "muse till the fire burns"; on yonder bookseller's counter is an epitome of the wisdom of ages; there he may buy a nosegay to propitiate his lady-love, or a sewing-machine to beguile his womankind, and here a crimson balloon or spring rocking-horse, to delight his little boy, and rare gems or a silver service for a bridal gift. This English tailor will provide him with a "capital fit," that German tobacconist with a creamy meerschaum. At the artificial Spa he may recuperate with Vichy or Kissingen, and at the phrenologist's have his mental and moral aptitudes defined; now a "medium" invites him to a spiritual séance, and now an antiquarian to a "curiosity shop." In one saloon is lager such as he drank in Bavaria, and in another, the best bivalves in the world. Here is a fine billiard-table, there a gymnasium;—food for mind and body, gratification to taste;—all the external resources of civilization are at hand,—not always with the substantial superiority of those of London or the elegant variety of Paris, but with enough of both to make them available to the eclectic cosmopolite.

The historical epochs of New York are adequately traceable by the successive pictures of her main thoroughfare,—beginning with the Indian village and the primeval forest which Henry Hudson found on the island of Manhattan in 1609, and advancing to the stockade fort of New Amsterdam, built where the Battery now is, by Wouter Van Twiller, the second Dutch governor, and thence to the era when the fur trade, tobacco-growing, and slavery were enriching the India Company, when the Wall was built on the site of the so-called financial rendezvous, to protect the settlement from savage invasion, and a deep valley marked the present junction of Canal Street and Broadway. The advent of a new class of artisans signalizes the arrival of Huguenot emigrants; the rebellion of Leisler marks the encroachment of new political agencies, and the substitution of Pitt's statue for that of George III. on the Bowling Green in 1770, the dawn of Independence, so sturdily ushered in and cherished by the Liberty Boys, and culminating in the evacuation of the British in 1783, the entrance of Washington with the American army, and, two years after, in the meeting of the first Congress. These vicissitudes left their impress on the street. Every church but the Episcopal was turned by the English into a riding-school, prison, or stable; each successive charter was more liberal in its municipal privileges. The Boston stage long went from the Fort to the Park, and so on by the old