MANHATTAN FROM THE BAY
_June 25_.--Returned to New York last night. Out to-day on the waters for a sail in the wide bay, southeast of Staten island--a rough, tossing ride, and a free sight--the long stretch of Sandy Hook, the highlands of Navesink, and the many vessels outward and inward bound. We came up through the midst of all, in the full sun. I especially enjoy'd the last hour or two. A moderate sea-breeze had set in; yet over the city, and the waters adjacent, was a thin haze, concealing nothing, only adding to the beauty. From my point of view, as I write amid the soft breeze, with a sea-temperature, surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show. To the left the North river with its far vista--nearer, three or four war-ships, anchor'd peacefully--the Jersey side, the banks of Weehawken, the Palisades, and the gradually receding blue, lost in the distance--to the right the East river--the mast-hemm'd shores--the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below--(the tide is just changing to its ebb)--the broad water-spread everywhere crowded--no, not crowded, but thick as stars in the sky--with all sorts and sizes of sail and steam vessels, plying ferry-boats, arriving and departing coasters, great ocean Dons, iron-black, modern, magnificent in size and power, fill'd with their incalculable value of human life and precious merchandise--with here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds, (I wonder if shore or sea elsewhere can outvie them,) ever with their slanting spars, and fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion--first-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm'd, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices group'd at the centre--the green of the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven above, and June haze on the surface below.
HUMAN AND HEROIC NEW YORK
The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn--(will not the time hasten when the two shall be municipally united in one, and named Manhattan?)--what I may call the human interior and exterior of these great seething oceanic populations, as I get it in this visit, is to me best of all. After an absence of many years, (I went away at the outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay since,) again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets, I knew so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic Bowery--human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day--in the places of amusement at night--bubbling and whirling and moving like its own environment of waters--endless humanity in all phases--Brooklyn also--taken in for the last three weeks. No need to specify minutely--enough to say that (making all allowances for the shadows and side-streaks of a million-headed-city) the brief total of the impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me comforting, even heroic, beyond statement. Alertness, generally fine physique, clear eyes that look straight at you, a singular combination of reticence and self-possession, with good nature and friendliness--a prevailing range of according manners, taste and intellect, surely beyond any elsewhere upon earth--and a palpable outcropping of that personal comradeship I look forward to as the subtlest, strongest future hold of this many-item'd Union--are not only constantly visible here in these mighty channels of men, but they form the rule and average. To-day, I should say--defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions--an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours--fully aware of all that can be said on the other side--I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken--the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords--namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city--city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings.
HOURS FOR THE SOUL
_July 22d, 1878_.--Living down in the country again. A wonderful conjunction of all that goes to make those sometime miracle-hours after sunset--so near and yet so far. Perfect, or nearly perfect days, I notice, are not so very uncommon; but the combinations that make perfect nights are few, even in a life time. We have one of those perfections to-night. Sunset left things pretty clear; the larger stars were visible soon as the shades allow'd. A while after 8, three or four great black clouds suddenly rose, seemingly from different points, and sweeping with broad swirls of wind but no thunder, underspread the orbs from view everywhere, and indicated a violent heatstorm. But without storm, clouds, blackness and all, sped and vanish'd as suddenly as they had risen; and from a little after 9 till 11 the atmosphere and the whole show above were in that state of exceptional clearness and glory just alluded to. In the northwest turned the Great Dipper with its pointers round the Cynosure. A little south of east the constellation of the Scorpion was fully up, with red Antares glowing in its neck; while dominating, majestic Jupiter swam, an hour and a half risen, in the east--(no moon till after 11.) A large part of the sky seem'd just laid in great splashes of phosphorus. You could look deeper in, farther through, than usual; the orbs thick as heads of wheat in a field. Not that there was any special brilliancy either--nothing near as sharp as I have seen of keen winter nights, but a curious general luminousness throughout to sight, sense, and soul. The latter had much to do with it. (I am convinced there are hours of Nature, especially of the atmosphere, mornings and evenings, address'd to the soul. Night transcends, for that purpose, what the proudest day can do.) Now, indeed, if never before, the heavens declared the glory of God. It was to the full sky of the Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest poems. There, in abstraction and stillness, (I had gone off by myself to absorb the scene, to have the spell unbroken,) the copiousness, the removedness, vitality, loose-clear-crowdedness, of that stellar concave spreading overhead, softly absorb'd into me, rising so free, interminably high, stretching east, west, north, south--and I, though but a point in the centre below, embodying all.
As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and through me its placid and untellable lesson, beyond--O, so infinitely beyond!--anything from art, books, sermons, or from science, old or new. The spirit's hour--religion's hour--the visible suggestion of God in space and time--now once definitely indicated, if never again. The untold pointed at--the heavens all paved with it. The Milky Way, as if some superhuman symphony, some ode of universal vagueness, disdaining syllable and sound--a flashing glance of Deity, address'd to the soul. All silently--the indescribable night and stars--far off and silently.
THE DAWN.--_July 23_.--This morning, between one and two hours before sunrise, a spectacle wrought on the same background, yet of quite different beauty and meaning. The moon well up in the heavens, and past her half, is shining brightly--the air and sky of that cynical-clear, Minerva-like quality, virgin cool--not the weight of sentiment or mystery, or passion's ecstasy indefinable--not the religious sense, the varied All, distill'd and sublimated into one, of the night just described. Every star now clear-cut, showing for just what it is, there in the colorless ether. The character of the heralded morning, ineffably sweet and fresh and limpid, but for the esthetic sense alone, and for purity without sentiment. I have itemized the night--but dare I attempt the cloudless dawn? (What subtle tie is this between one's soul and the break of day? Alike, and yet no two nights or morning shows ever exactly alike.) Preceded by an immense star, almost unearthly in its effusion of white splendor, with two or three long unequal spoke-rays of diamond radiance, shedding down through the fresh morning air below--an hour of this, and then the sunrise.