needs a mystic.

No city so challenges and debilitates the imagination. Here, where
wonder is a daily companion, desire to tell her our ecstasy becomes at
last only a faint pain in the mind. If you would mute a poet's lyre,
put him on a ferry from Jersey City some silver April morning; or send
him aboard at Liberty Street in an October dusk. Poor soul, his mind
will buzz (for years to come) after adequate speech to tell those cliffs
and scarps, amethyst and lilac in the mingled light; the clear topaz
chequer of window panes; the dull bluish olive of the river, streaked
and crinkled with the churn of the screw! Many a poet has come to her in
the wooing passion. Give him six months, he is merely her Platonist. He
lives content with placid companionship. Where are his adjectives, his
verbs? That inward knot of amazement, what speech can unravel it?

Her air, when it is typical, is light, dry, cool. It is pale, it is
faintly tinctured with pearl and opal. Heaven is unbelievably remote;
the city itself daring so high, heaven lifts in a cautious remove. Light
and shadow are fantastically banded, striped, and patchworked among her
cavern streets; a cool, deep gloom is cut across with fierce jags and
blinks of brightness. She smiles upon man who takes his ease in her
colossal companionship. Her clean soaring perpendiculars call the eye
upward. One wanders as a botanist in a tropical forest. That great
smooth groinery of the Pennsylvania Station train shed: is it not the
arching fronds of iron palm trees? Oh, to be a botanist of this vivid
jungle, spread all about one, anatomist of the ribs and veins that run
from the great backbone of Broadway!

To love her, one thinks, is to love one's fellows; each of them having
some unknown share in her loveliness. Any one of her streets would be
the study and delight of a lifetime. To speak at random, we think of
that little world of brightness and sound bourgeois cheer that spreads
around the homely Verdi statue at Seventy-third Street. We have a
faithful affection for that neighbourhood, for reasons of our own.
Within a radius, thereabouts, of a quarter-mile each way, we could live
a year and learn new matters every day. They call us a hustling folk.
Observe the tranquil afternoon light in those brownstone byways. Pass
along leisurely Amsterdam Avenue, the region of small and genial shops,
Amsterdam Avenue of the many laundries. See the children trooping
upstairs to their own room at t