to all streets devoted to
trade, but here uniquely combined with a fashionable promenade, and
affording the still-life of a variegated moving panorama. It is
characteristic, also, that the only palatial buildings along the crowded
avenue are stores and hotels. Architecture thus glorifies the gregarious
extravagance of the people. The effect of the whole is indefinitely
prolonged, to an imaginative mind, by the vistas at the lower extremity,
which reveal the river, and, at sunset, the dark tracery of the shipping
against the far and flushed horizon; while, if one lifts his eye to the
telegraph wire, or lowers it to some excavation which betrays the
Croton pipes, a sublime consciousness is awakened of the relation of
this swift and populous eddy of life's great ocean to its distant rural
streams, and the ebb and flow of humanity's eternal tide. Consider, too,
the representative economics and delectations around, available to
taste, necessity, and cash,--how wonderful their contrast! Not long
since, an Egyptian museum, with relics dating from the Pharaohs, was
accessible to the Broadway philosopher, and a Turkish khan to the
sybarite; one has but to mount a staircase, and find himself in the
presence of authentic effigies of all the prominent men of the nation,
sun-painted for the million. This pharmacist will exorcise his
pain-demon; that electrician place him _en rapport_ with kindred
hundreds of miles away, or fortify his jaded nerves. Down this street he
may enjoy a Russian or Turkish bath; down that, a water-cure. Here, with
skill undreamed of by civilized antiquity, fine gold can be made to
replace the decayed segment of a tooth; there, he has but to stretch out
his foot, and a chiropodist removes the throbbing bunion, or a boy
kneels to polish his boots. A hackman is at hand to drive him to the
Park, a telescope to show him the stars; he has but to pause at a corner
and buy a journal which will place him _au courant_ with the events of
the world, or listen to an organ-grinder, and think himself at the
opera. This temple is free for him to enter and "muse till the fire
burns"; on yonder bookseller's counter is an epitome of the wisdom of
ages; there he may buy a nosegay to propitiate his lady-love, or a
sewing-machine to beguile his womankind, and here a crimson balloon or
spring rocking-horse, to delight his little boy, and rare gems or a
silver service for a bridal gift. This English tailor will provide him
with a