steer through the perilous midnight,
Let your faithful glances go
To the steadfast stars above her,
From their fickle gleams below.

* * * * *

THROUGH BROADWAY.

The incessant demolition of which Broadway is the scene denotes to the
most careless eye that devotion to the immediate which De Tocqueville
maintains to be a democratic characteristic. The huge piles of old
bricks which block the way--with their array of placards heralding every
grade of popular amusement, from a tragedy of Shakespeare to a negro
melody, and from a menagerie to a clairvoyant exhibition, and vaunting
every kind of experimental charlatanism, from quack medicine to flash
literature--are mounds of less mystery, but more human meaning, than
those which puzzle archaeologists on the Mississippi and the Ohio; for
they are the _debris_ of mansions only half a century ago the
aristocratic homes of families whose descendants are long since
scattered, and whose social prominence and local identity are forgotten,
while trade has obliterated every vestige of their roof-tree and
association of their hearth-stone. Such is the constant process. As
private residences give way to stores and offices, the upper portion of
the island is crowded with their enlarged dimensions and elaborate
luxury; churches are in the same manner sacrificed, until St. Paul's and
Trinity alone remain of the old sacred landmarks; and the suburban
feature--those "fields" where burgomasters foregathered, the militia
drilled, and Hamilton's youthful eloquence roused the people to arms--is
transferred to the other and distant end of Manhattan, and expanded into
a vast, variegated, and beautiful rural domain,--that "the Park" may
coincide in extent and attraction with the increase of the population
and growth of the city's area. Thus a perpetual tide of emigration, and
the pressure of the business on the resident section,--involving change
of domicile, substitution of uses, the alternate destruction and
erection of buildings, each being larger and more costly in material
than its predecessor,--make the metropolis of the New World appear, to
the visitor from the Old, a shifting bivouac rather than a stable city,
where hereditary homes are impossible, and nomadic instincts prevalent,
and where local associations, such as endear or identify the streets
abroad, seem as incongruous as in the Eastern desert or Western woods,
whose dwellers "fo