From the Easy Chair, Volume 3

by George William Curtis

When she came in I saw her come up the bay. I saw her come down as she departed. In the distance, blending with the spires of the city and the lesser masts, there was the towering cluster rising above all. I listened for the guns. I looked for the attendant craft. There were neither, except a brief salute from the Cunarder in port. But the bay of New York will be watched for many a year before so grand and stately a sight will be seen again as that great ship making her way through the Narrows to the sea. When she entered the bay she seemed majestic and conciliatory; as she left it, she was majestic and disdainful. Yet this was only the impression of a moment and of the distance. As she neared the forts at the Narrows entirely alone, with no accompanying steam or sail vessel, with all the hard luck of her life behind her and following her even to the latest hour of her stay in America, with the fact that she had utterly lost all hold upon public interest made glaringly palpable by the absolute loneliness of her departure, she yet fired a proud salute as she swept out of the upper bay—a stern farewell that echoed coldly from unanswering shores—and with the stars and stripes floating at her peak, magnificent and majestic, the Great Eastern departed.

Gradually, as she passed far down the lower bay, she returned into the same hazy vastness that I remembered when I first saw her—in which, in the memories of all who saw her, she will forever remain.

CHURCH STREET

N the earliest of the really spring-like mornings as the Easy Chair turned into Church Street it could not help perceiving that in some romantic ways the New-Yorker has the advantage of the Londoner and Parisian. Church Street does not, indeed, seem at the first mention to be a promising domain of romance, nor a fond haunt of the Muses. Indeed, it must not be denied that it has an unsavory name; and when the city loiterer recalls Wapping, or a May morning on the Seine quais, he will smile at Church Street as a field of romance, and the Easy Chair grants him absolution. London, perhaps, does not strike the American imagination, or, let us more truly say, the imagination of the travelling American, as a romantic city. That citizen of the world reserves for himself Venice, Constantinople, Grand Cairo. Yet if after his arrival he will buy Peter Cunningham's Hand-book for London at the nearest book-store, and turn its pages slowly, he will discover that for him, an American, he is in a very romantic city indeed. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's Tower of London will show him how copious a sermon may be preached from one romantic text. Of course he can be expected to have no feeling but pity for the unfortunates who fill the streets, and whose fate it was to be born Britishers. Yet, let him reflect that it was not their fault, and except for that precise unhappy fact of being Britishers, which causes all the mischief, their parents too would have lived elsewhere.

Then the American citizen of the world, pitying England, will cross to France, to another country, a new world, and in Paris will breathe more freely as being at last in the metropolis of the globe—always excepting New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, or Chicago, as the case may be. If he opens Galignani's Guide, the excellent and well-informed traveller will immediately discover that he is in another romantic city, and that there is something more to see and consider than the bal d'opera, and the Château Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a café, should chance to ask whether the well-informed traveller had ever taken a romantic stroll in Church Street, New York, he would be rewarded with a smile for his admirable humor. By-and-by, after the coffee was drunk and the pipe smoked out, the Easy Chair and his approving Mentor would perhaps stroll about until they came far away from the haunts of to-day to the respectable old Place Louis Quinze. It is always an attractive spot for that well-informed traveller. He looks at it with pensive emotion, and turns warmly to the Easy Chair and says:

"How delightful this is! Here dwelt the noblesse! This is the Fifth Avenue—what do I say?—the Murray Hill of old Paris! And now all is gone! Fashion is an emigré. Inquire in the Faubourg St. Germain. What a pity we have nothing of this kind in America."

"But we have," replies the Easy Chair.

The incredulous well-informed traveller again smiles a mild, melancholy smile at the inscrutable methods of Providence, which has provided no Place Louis Quinze for the Yankees and aborigines.

"We certainly have," persists the Easy Chair.