No longer to be thrilled ... will mean to be old.
It seems perfectly proper that they should, for they must build in some direction and see what valuable real estate they have given up to those dead people who cannot even appreciate it. Here among the quiet graves the thoughtful stranger is accustomed to moralize tritely on how thoughtless of death and eternity is "the hurrying throng" just outside the iron fence, who, by the way, have to pass that church every day, in many cases three or four times, and so can't very well keep on being impressed by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is just as well not to worry during the hours God meant for work. Even though one cannot get much of a view from the steeple, except down Wall Street, which looks harmless and disappointingly narrow and quiet at first sight, Trinity is still one of the show-places of New York, and it makes a pleasing and restful landmark in the walk up Broadway. It deserves to be starred in Baedeker.
Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town: from Trinity to St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical Down-Town. So much in a hurry is it that at Cedar Street it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole section of numbers from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not so capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128.
The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, although half of them never spend an entire day in New York City from one end of the month to the other, and half of that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters pour.
*****
Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick, so that the occasional old-fashioned five or six story buildings of solid walls with steep steps leading up to the door, seem like playthings beside which the modern building shoots up—on up, as if just beginning where the old ones left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices, or magnified obelisks, as seen from the ferries, the windows and lettering for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like plain goods-boxes on end, or suggest, the ornate ones, pieces of carefully cut cake standing alone and ready to fall over at any moment and damage the icing.
... Grace Church Spire becomes nearer.
Good old St. Paul's, which is really old and, to some of us, more lovable than ornate, Anglican Trinity, has also been made to look insignificant in size by its overpowering commercial neighbors, especially as seen from the Sixth Avenue Elevated cars against the new, ridiculous high building on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its plain, broad, Colonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem to care so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more rural and church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as though miles instead of a few feet from Broadway and business.