s essential charm to a New-Yorker cannot express
itself in figures, nor, indeed, in any adequate manner. It is the city
of his soul. He loves it with a passionate dignity which will not let
him swagger like the Cockney or twitter like the Parisian. His love for
New York goes frequently unacknowledged even to himself, until a
necessary absence of unusual length teaches him how hard it would be to
lose the city of his affections forever.

It is a bath of other souls. It will not let a man harden in his own
epidermis. He must affect and be affected by multitudinous varieties of
temperament, race, character. He avoids grooves, because New York will
not tolerate grooviness. He knows that he must be able, on demand, to
bowl anywhere over the field of human tastes and sympathies.
Professionally he may be a specialist, but in New York his specialty
must be only the axis around which are grouped encyclopaedic learning,
faultless skill, and catholic intuitions. Nobody will waste a Saturday
afternoon riding on his hobby-horse. He must be a broad-natured person,
or he will be a mere imperceptible line on the general background of
obscure citizens. He feels that he is surrounded by people who will help
him do his best, yes, who will make him do it, or drive him out to
install such as will. If he think of a good thing to do, he knows that
the market for all good things is close around him. Whatever surplus of
himself he has for communication, that he knows to be absolutely sure of
a recipient before the day is done. New York, like Goethe's Olympus,
says to every man with capacity and self-faith,--

"Here is all fulness, ye brave, to reward you:
Work, and despair not!"

Moreover, the moral air of New York City is in certain respects the
purest air a man can breathe. This may seem a paradox. New York City is
not often quoted as an example of purity. To the philosopher her
atmosphere is cleaner than that of a country village. As the air of a
contracted space may grow poisonous by respiration, while pure air rests
over the entire surface of the earth in virtue of being the final
solvent to all terrestrial decompositions, so it is possible that a few
good, but narrow people may get alone together in the country, and hatch
a social organism far more morbid than the metropolitan. In the latter
instance, aberrations counterbalance each other, and the body politic,
cursed though it be with bad officials, has more vitality in it