fall? This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet
in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city!
By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a
maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among
cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force
of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, singing of
high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the
mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, Greece! Italy, do you keep
Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a younger
day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here
hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in
their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.

From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange
company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the
primer of refinement, hungry for something the significance of
which, when they had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be
called great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here
came the dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony;
the hopeful student of Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the
enfranchised miner of California and the Rockies, his bags of gold
and silver in his hands. Here was already the bewildered foreigner,
an alien speech confounding him--the Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the
German, the Russian--seeking his homely colonies, fearing his
neighbor of another race.

Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler, the
romantic adventurer par excellence. A city with but a handful of
the native-born; a city packed to the doors with all the riffraff
of a thousand towns. Flaring were the lights of the bagnio;