h
sight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northward
through the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has come
to pass. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with
red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort
House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and
steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring!
Imagination, you scoff--and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not
imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with
delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green
'bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming
round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray,
are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red
brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let
the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more
into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your
spirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty of
light left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry is
dusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around the
fountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful,
Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like a
cluster of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains of
Lombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch of
ancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannot
argue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framing
the other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter
day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peace
and calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins,

"Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles on miles...."

How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture
together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well,
and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the
windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle
of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones
leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity
steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the
old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many red
sunsets have I seen glow through i