art in New York. I
know of no crossing in New York so trying to the nerves as Piccadilly
Circus or Charing Cross (Trafalgar Square). The intersection of
Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, at Madison Square, is the
nearest approach to these bewildering ganglia of traffic. It must be
owned, too, that the Bowery, with its two "elevated" tracks and four
lines of trolley-cars, is a place where one cannot safely let one's wits
go wool-gathering, especially on a rainy evening when the roadway is
under repair. Let me add that there is one place in New York where the
whirl of traffic ("whirl" in a literal sense) is unique and amazing. I
mean the covered area at the New York end of Brooklyn Bridge where the
transpontine electric cars, in an incessant stream, swoop down the
curves of the bridge and sweep round on their return journey. The scene
at night is indescribable. The air seems supersaturated with
electricity, flashing and crackling on every hand. One has a sense of
having strayed unwittingly into the midst of a miniature planetary
system in full swing, with the boom of the trolleys, in their mazy
courses, to represent the music of the spheres.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: I find the same idea (a sufficiently obvious one) finely
expressed by Mr. Richard Hovey in his book of poems entitled _Along the
Trail_:

Look, how the overhead train at the Morningside curve
Loops like a sea-born dragon its sinuous flight.
Loops in the night in and out, high up in the air,
Like a serpent of stars with the coil and undulant reach of waves.]

LETTER V

Character and Culture--American Universities--Is the American "Electric"
or Phlegmatic?--Alleged Laxity of the Family Tie--Postscript; the
University System.

NEW YORK.

It is four weeks to-day since I landed in New York, and, save for forty
hours in Philadelphia and four hours in Brooklyn, I have spent all that
time in Manhattan Island. Yet, to my shame be it spoken, I am not
prepared with any generalisation as to the American character. It has
been my good fortune to see a great deal of literary and artistic New
York, and, comparing it with literary and artistic London, I am inclined
to say "Pompey and Caesar berry much alike--specially Pompey!" The New
Yorker is far more cosmopolitan than the Londoner; of that there is no
doubt. He knows all that we know about current English literature. He
knows all that we do _not_ know about current American literature. He