mething to regain our lost opportunity? We
should then have the outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but
the fish was one of the Greek ideals of the female form." He was silent
still, and we gathered courage to press on. "As it is, we are not
altogether hideous. We doubt whether there are not more beautiful
buildings in New York now than there are in Boston; and as for statues,
where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of our Saint-Gaudens
Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward Indian Hunter?"

"The Shaw monument blots them all out," our friend relentlessly
answered. "But these are merely details. Our civic good things are
accidental. Boston's are intentional. That is the great, the vital
difference."

It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so crushed us under
foot. But, with the trodden worm's endeavor to turn, we made a last
appeal. "And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do
something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our
sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness,
when we have got a sky-scraper-line?"

It seemed to us that here was a point which he could not meet; and, in
fact, he could only say, whether in irony or not, "I would rather not
think."

We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our silence invited
us, we found that we would rather not ourselves think of the image we
had invoked. We preferred to take up the question at another point.

"Well," we said, "in your impressions of Bostonian greatness we suppose
that you received the effect of her continued supremacy in authors as
well as authorship, in artists as well as art? You did not meet Emerson
or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or Holmes or Hawthorne or Whittier
about her streets, but surely you met their peers, alive and in the
flesh?"

"No," our friend admitted, "not at every corner. But what I did meet was
the effect of those high souls having abode there while on the earth.
The great Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists are
worse--they have come to New York; they have not even waited to die. But
whether they have died, or whether they have come to New York, they have
left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the place that has known
them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never
ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though you
don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York--ou