It is
characteristic, also, that the only palatial buildings along the crowded
avenue are stores and hotels. Architecture thus glorifies the gregarious
extravagance of the people. The effect of the whole is indefinitely
prolonged, to an imaginative mind, by the vistas at the lower extremity,
which reveal the river, and, at sunset, the dark tracery of the shipping
against the far and flushed horizon; while, if one lifts his eye to the
telegraph wire, or lowers it to some excavation which betrays the
Croton pipes, a sublime consciousness is awakened of the relation of
this swift and populous eddy of life's great ocean to its distant rural
streams, and the ebb and flow of humanity's eternal tide. Consider, too,
the representative economics and delectations around, available to
taste, necessity, and cash,--how wonderful their contrast! Not long
since, an Egyptian museum, with relics dating from the Pharaohs, was
accessible to the Broadway philosopher, and a Turkish khan to the
sybarite; one has but to mount a staircase, and find himself in the
presence of authentic effigies of all the prominent men of the nation,
sun-painted for the million. This pharmacist will exorcise his
pain-demon; that electrician place him _en rapport_ with kindred
hundreds of miles away, or fortify his jaded nerves.
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