The news
of victories during the war for the Union could be read there in
people's eyes and heard in their greetings. Sorrowful tidings seemed to
magnetize with sadness the long procession. Something in the air
foretold the stranger how beat the public pulse. The undercurrent of the
prevalent emotion seems to vibrate, with electric sympathy, along the
human tide.
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.
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