"And, from its station in the hall,
an ancient timepiece says to all,
'Forever—never!
Never—forever!'"
"Through days of sorrow and of mirth,
Through days of death and days of birth,
Through every swift vicissitude
Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood,
And as if, like God, it all things saw,
It calmly repeats those words of awe
'Forever—never!
Never—forever!'"
It knew more than I did, and could point out the moon's changes, and the seasons, and the seconds.
What makes the place? Not any one man, nor any group of men, but the inner spirit of the city, what I will call the genius of community life, which gives that indefinable tone that marks the city from the town, and that when amplified belongs only to an industrial assemblage of people. I attributed her phenomenal individualism, first to her unpedestaled idol, Rev. Parsons Cook, D.D., who made so much of individual work and accountability, also to her antecedents and atmosphere in which men working alone developed the contemplative habits of shoemakers. As they kept thinking they kept having new ideas and they had them hard. Families dwelt apart. Nothing is so revolutionary as the development of apartment hotels, and particularly of a prodigious number of restaurants. Her social, charitable and benefit associations must have arisen in the years under review, from almost a negligible quantity to well-nigh half a thousand.
A Social Revolution
In the self-evolving life of the place there has been a strong trend toward associated life, which has reconditioned everything. It is without a parallel in the entire history of the community. Cities are themselves prominent waymarks in human history. Cincinnatus, when at his plow, was summoned by voices from the city. The tendency toward congregate life is witnessed by the enormous increase in the number of play-houses and in the attendance upon them. In an earlier day one stood for a time in solitary prominence and has become grandfather to a big brood. There has been an astounding increase in what I will call the department of service. If a person is on the street in the late afternoon when the matinees are over, and the women's clubs, and as well the errands and social visits, he will see another form of new, associated life, in the descent by hundreds, upon all the new delicatessen shops, and similar departments in stores where cooked and nicely prepared foods are kept for evening tables. If anything has seemed hungrier than these individuals, it has been the furnace during severe weather.
The Glory of the Commonplace
Because of increasing wealth and education and refinement, people put out their work more into laundries and bakeries and general mutual business concerns. This, like mercy, blesses him that gives and him that takes. If anything is to be inferred from the growth in co-operative housekeeping in the last generation it will come to some real good, complete result, surely, in the next decade. Speed the day. It is of course the solution in part of the servant girl question. What was once a luxury is now assumed to be a necessity. As things are going, men will soon refuse a mansion in the skies, unless luxuries are promised that our ancestors never heard of. We would expect great development in a rural community that is in the knee-pant period. As Cicero said, "Nothing is discovered and perfected at the same time." We do well, for every reason, to make much of what is so delightfully historic.
Even patriotism is grounded and rooted in the past. I like a certain relish there is in the place. The soul of it, too, suits my fancy. Things, there, were in some way pitched in the right key. It took New York a hundred and seventy-five years to gain its first thirty-three thousand inhabitants. While our industrial city has developed very much more rapidly, the unlikeness ceases, when it comes to the matter of crooked streets, which prevail also in Boston, but some one has said that he does not include Boston when he speaks of the United States. In the inspired volume we read of a street that was called Straight, but that term would not be applied to Pearl St. in New York, which hits Broadway twice. Mr. Ruskin tells us that there is not one straight line in nature.