It is a bath of other souls. It will not let a man harden in his own epidermis. He must affect and be affected by multitudinous varieties of temperament, race, character. He avoids grooves, because New York will not tolerate grooviness. He knows that he must be able, on demand, to bowl anywhere over the field of human tastes and sympathies. Professionally he may be a specialist, but in New York his specialty must be only the axis around which are grouped encyclopaedic learning, faultless skill, and catholic intuitions. Nobody will waste a Saturday afternoon riding on his hobby-horse. He must be a broad-natured person, or he will be a mere imperceptible line on the general background of obscure citizens. He feels that he is surrounded by people who will help him do his best, yes, who will make him do it, or drive him out to install such as will. If he think of a good thing to do, he knows that the market for all good things is close around him. Whatever surplus of himself he has for communication, that he knows to be absolutely sure of a recipient before the day is done. New York, like Goethe's Olympus, says to every man with capacity and self-faith,-- "Here is all fulness, ye brave, to reward you: Work, and despair not!" Moreover, the moral air of New York City is in certain respects the purest air a man can breathe. This may seem a paradox. New York City is not often quoted as an example of purity. To the philosopher her atmosphere is cleaner than that of a country village. As the air of a contracted space may grow poisonous by respiration, while pure air rests over the entire surface of the earth in virtue of being the final solvent to all terrestrial decompositions, so it is possible that a few good, but narrow people may get alone together in the country, and hatch a social organism far more morbid than the metropolitan. In the latter instance, aberrations counterbalance each other, and the body politic, cursed though it be with bad officials, has more vitality in it than could be excited by any conclave of excellent men with one idea, meeting, however, solemnly, to feed it with legislative pap.