Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. And every few
seconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lighted
thoroughfare--scores upon scores of them, with a wider and more
brilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot at
what hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of New
York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metropolitan city. I thought,
"Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the
best of 'em." I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew
the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing. And I
was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those mysterious
generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting together,
girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen by me till then,
this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its baseness,
its rectitude and its mournful errors, its colossal sense of life. I
liked New York irrevocably.




II

STREETS


When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of
Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish
gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare
I had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain European capitals
has forced me to modify this judgment; but I still think that Fifth
Avenue, if not unequaled, is unsurpassed.