to your place on top, about three o'clock, you looked up or down
the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point
under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness
at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made
me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical
lines of Keats:

'His soul shall know the sadness of her night,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'"

We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. "Explain, O
Howadji!"

"I would rather not, as you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will
come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary
distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I
differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs,
moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the
street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand
at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with the coming
and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds them in the
continuous current. That is, of course, something you get in greater
quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London 'block,' but
there is something more fluent, more mercurially impatient, in a New
York street jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don't ask me to
explain! I would rather not!" he said, and we submitted.

He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point.
"Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year's absence, in this
novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on
the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population,
and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in
response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet." Our friend
laughed in self-derision, as he went on. "I remember when we first
began to have the electric trolleys--"

"Trams, we believe you call them," we insinuated.

"Not when I'm on this side," he retorted, and he resumed: "I used to be
afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I
particularly took my life in my hand, and my 'courage in both hands.'
Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue
and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man's Curve (he has long been
resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over
alive, and I blesse