"I wish I could say! It was as unbeautiful as it could be, but it was wonderful! Has anybody else ever said that there is no place like it? On some accounts I am glad there isn't; one place of the kind is enough; but what I mean is that I went about all the next day after arriving from Boston, with Europe still in my brain, and tried for something suggestive of some other metropolis, and failed. There was no question of Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my first glimpse of Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward from the Grand Central Station. But I tried with Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with Paris, and found it a blonder and blither Boston; with London, and found it sombrely irrelevant and incomparable. New York is like London only in not being like any other place, and it is next to London in magnitude. So far, so good; but the resemblance ends there, though New York is oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than we willingly allow to Londoners. Both, however, have an admirable quality which is not beauty. One might call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and in New York one might call it—"
He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine line for the greater convenience of mentally visioning.
"What?" we impatiently prompted.
"I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think of sublimity?"
"We always defend New York against you. We accept sublimity. How?"
"I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer Fifth Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in the other measures of the city's extent."
FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET
"This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave out of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West Side?"