reckless, scholarly
rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the
Artists' Quarter--that haven for unconventional souls.

_"Yet we are free who live in Washington Square,
We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare,
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious;
What care we for a dull old world censorious,
When each is sure he'll fashion something glorious?"_

So we find that the romance of Colonial days still blooms freshly
below Fourteenth Street and that people still rush to the Village to
escape the world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hundred years
ago. But the third and last point of unity is perhaps the most
striking. Always, we know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to
conform to any rule of thumb. We know that when the Commissioners
checker-boarded off the town they found they couldn't checker-board
Greenwich. It was too independent and too set in its ways. It had its
lanes and trails and cow-paths and nothing could induce it to become
resigned to straight streets and measured avenues. It would not
conform, and it never has conformed. And even more strenuously has its
mental development defied the draughtsman's compass and triangle.
Greenwich will not straighten its streets nor conventionalise its
views. Its intellectual conclusions will always be just as unexpected
as the squares and street angles that one stumbles on head first. Its
habit of life will be just as weirdly individual as its tangled
blocks. It asks nothing better than to be let alone. It does not
welcome tourists, though it is hospitality itself to wayfarers seeking
an open door. It is the Village, and it will never, never, no _never_
be anything else--the Village of the streets that wouldn't be
straight!

Janvier, who has already been quoted extensively, but who has written
of Greenwich so well that his quotations can't be avoided, says: "In
addition to being hopelessly at odds with the surrounding city,
Greenwich is handsomely at variance with itself."

New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by curious and indirect
means, as we have seen. This fact and a lively and sympathetic
consciousness of it, leads often to seemingly irrelevant digressions.
Yet, is it not worth a moment's pause to find out that the stately
site of Washington Square North, as well as other adjacent and select
territory, was originally the property of two visionary seamen; and
that the present erratic deflection of Broad