age; the comparative vulgarity of
the environment drinking it up, on one side, like an insatiable sponge,
and yet failing at the same time to impair its virtue. The refinement
prevails and, as it were, succeeds; holds its own in the medley of
accidents, where nothing else is refined unless it be the amplitude of
the 'quiet' note in the front of the Metropolitan Club; amuses itself,
in short, with being as extravagantly 'intellectual' as it likes. Why,
therefore, given the surrounding medium, does it so triumphantly impose
itself, and impose itself not insidiously and gradually, but immediately
and with force? Why does it not pay the penalty of expressing an idea
and being founded on one?--such scant impunity seeming usually to be
enjoyed among us, at this hour, by any artistic intention of the finer
strain? But I put these questions only to give them up--for what I feel
beyond anything else is that Mr. Saint Gaudens somehow takes care of
himself."

Facing the Sherman group, in the centre of the square, with the
Cornelius Vanderbilt house in the background, is the Fountain of
Abundance, or the Pulitzer Memorial Fountain, designed by Karl Bitter
(his last work), executed by Isidore Konti, and erected in 1915 to the
memory of the late Joseph Pulitzer, for many years proprietor of the New
York "World." The structure is surmounted by the bronze figure of a
nymph, bearing a basket laden with the fruits of the earth. The
Vanderbilt residence which is the background when the Fountain is viewed
from the north is of red brick with grey facings in the style of a
French chateau of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

CHAPTER XVIII

_Stretches of the Avenue_

Stretches of the Avenue--The Days of Squatter Kings--Seneca
Village--"Millionaire's Row"--The Avenue Gates--The Soul of Central
Park--Some Palaces of the Stretch--The Obelisk and the Metropolitan
Museum--Northward Through Harlem.

Here and there in the Island, far to the north, may be found an
unblasted rock on the top of which is perched an unpainted shanty with a
crude chimney spout from which smoke issues voluminously. A quarter of a
century ago there were thousands of such shanties along the upper West
Side. From the lofty iron height of the El. Road one could survey them
stretching all the way from the Sixties to One Hundred and Sixteenth. On
the summits the Lords of the Manors smoked their clay pipes in bland
disregard of the world and its rent-collector