The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
A walk in Broadway is a most available remedy for "domestic" vexation
and provincial egotism. "Every individual spirit," says Schiller, "waxes
in the great stream of multitudes." Stand awhile calmly by the rushing
stream, and note its representative significance, or stroll slowly
along, with observant eye, to mark the commodities and nationalities by
the way. The scene is an epitome of the world. Here crouches a Chinese
mendicant, there glides an Italian image-vender; a Swedish sailor is
hard pressed by a smoking Cuban, and a Hungarian officer is flanked by a
French loiterer; here leers a wanton, there moans a waif; now passes an
Irish funeral procession, and again long files of Teutonic "Turners";
the wistful eyes of a beggar stare at the piles of gold in the
money-changer's show-window; a sister of charity walks beside a Jewish
Rabbi; then comes a brawny negro, then a bare-legged Highlander; figures
such as are met in the Levant; school-boys with their books and
lunch-boxes, Cockneys fresh from Piccadilly, a student who reminds us of
Berlin, an American Indian, in pantaloons; a gaunt Western, a keen
Yankee, and a broad Dutch physiognomy alternate; flower-venders,
dog-pedlers, diplomates, soldiers, dandies, and vagabonds, pass and
disappear; a firemen's procession, fallen horse, dead-lock of vehicles,
military halt, or menagerie caravan, checks momently the advancing
throng; and some beautiful face or elegant costume looms out of the
confused picture like an exquisite vision; great cubes of lake crystal
glisten in the ice-carts hard by blocks of ebon coal from the forests of
the primeval world; there a letter-carrier threads his way, and here a
newsboy shouts his extra; a milk-cart rattles by, and a walking
advertisement stalks on; here is a fashionable doctor's gig, there a
mammoth express-wagon; a sullen Southerner contrasts with a grinning
Gaul, a darkly-vested bishop with a gayly-attired child, a
daintily-gloved belle with a mud-soiled drunkard; a little shoe-black
and a blind fiddler ply their trades in the shadow of Emmet's obelisk,
and a toy-merchant has Montgomery's mural tablet for a background; on
the fence is a string of favorite ballads and popular songs; a mock
auctioneer shouts from one door, and a silent wax effigy gazes from
another. Pisani, who accompanied Prince Napoleon in his yacht-voyage to
America, calls Broadway a bazaar made up of savagery and civilization, a
mile and a half long; and M. Fisch, a French _pasteur_, was surprised at
the sight of palaces six or seven stories high devoted to commerce and
_les figures fines et gracieuses, la demarche legere et libre des
femmes, les allures vives de toute la population_. The shopkeepers are
urbanely courteous, says one traveller. "Horses and harness are fine,
but equipages inferior," observes another; while a third remarks, after
witnessing the escapade of vehicles in Broadway: "American coachmen are
the most adroit in the world."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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