Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 104 December 1901 to May 1902 . en one is so genial, and as a matter of course—there comes thethe reward so wholly tempting, that the sense of having sacrificed to false gods,new-comer plunges into business and so- and the city resolves itself into nothingciety with an enthusiasm that surprises more than a triumph of mechanics, ofhimself. The Englishman who does not iron, steel, bricks, and electricity, builtsuccumb to New York in the first three by the Titans, laid out by Euclid, andmonths is a lost soul. furnished by Edison. Behind it there But all things
Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 104 December 1901 to May 1902 . en one is so genial, and as a matter of course—there comes thethe reward so wholly tempting, that the sense of having sacrificed to false gods,new-comer plunges into business and so- and the city resolves itself into nothingciety with an enthusiasm that surprises more than a triumph of mechanics, ofhimself. The Englishman who does not iron, steel, bricks, and electricity, builtsuccumb to New York in the first three by the Titans, laid out by Euclid, andmonths is a lost soul. furnished by Edison. Behind it there But all things have their ebb, and lies little or nothing to satisfy—no sur-slowly the Englishman feels his enthu- prises, no hidden nooks, no glimpse ofsiasm on the wane. Catch him after a the past, nothing but the whir and glittertwo years residence, and he is more likely of a vast machine. And busily idealizingto be full of anathemas than praise. He his own country as the exile always does,has reached the attitude and state of mind the Englishman begins to feel as though. Under Trinity Chimes, New York 298 HARPERS MONTHLY MAGAZINE. in coming to New York he had laid downMatthew Arnolds poems to enter a power-house. There comes a time when he canthink of himself as nothing but a bundleof freight in the grip of an exaggeratedexpress company. New York stretchesout before him as a gigantic counter, splitup into little squares to make businesseasy of despatch, and scaled down to thedull prose of buying and selling, of doingthings at the swiftest possible speed, ofsaving at any cost an inch of space anda second of time. It is this undisguised triumph of me-chanics over aesthetics, of the new anduseful over the old, that after a timemakes New York for an Englishmanrather a deadening city to live in. Theiron enters into ones soul, and comfort,one feels, can be bought at too high aprice. If only Americans could learnto do things a little more clumsily, theirmetropolis would have many more charm
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