A few years ago, at the very tip of that narrow rocky strip of land that
has been well named "the Tongue that laps the Commerce of the World,"
the million-teeming Island of Manhattan, there was daily presented a
scene in the life-drama of our land that held in itself, as in solution,
a great national ideal. The old heroic "Epic of the Nations" was still
visible to the naked eye, and masquerading here among us of the then
nineteenth century in the guise of the arrival of the immigrant ship.
The scenic setting is in this instance incomparably fine. As we lean on
the coping of the sea wall at the end of the green-swarded Battery, in
the flush of a May sunset that, on the right, throws the Highlands of
the Navesink into dark purple relief and lights the waters of Harbor,
River, and Sound into a softly swelling roseate flood, we may fix our
eyes on the approach to The Narrows and watch the incoming shipping of
the world: the fruit-laden steamer from the Bermudas, the black East
Indiaman heavy with teakwood and spices, the lumberman's barge awash
behind the tow, the old three-masted schooner, low in the water, her
decks loaded with granite from the far-away quarries of Maine. We may
see, if we linger, the swift approach of a curiously foreshortened
ocean steamship, her smokestack belching blackness, and the slower
on-coming of a Norwegian bark, her sails catching the sunset light and
gleaming opaline against the clear blue of the southern horizon. These
last are the immigrant ships.
An hour later in old Castle Garden the North and South of Europe clasp
hands on the very threshold of America. Four thousand feet are planted
on the soil of the New World. Four thousand hands are knocking at its
portals. Two thousand hearts are beating high with hope at prospect of
the New, or palpitating with terror at contact with the Strange.
A thousand tragedies, a thousand comedies are here enacted before our
very eyes: hopes, fears, tears, laughter, shrieks, groans, wailings,
exultant cries, welcoming words, silent all-expressing hand-clasp,
embrace, despairing wide-eyed search, hopeless isolation, the
befriended, the friendless, the home-welcomed, the homeless--all
commingled.
But an official routine soon sorts, separates, pairs, locates; speaks in
Norwegian, speaks in Neapolitan. An hour passes; the dusk falls; the
doors are opened; the two thousand, ticketed, labelled, are to enter
upon the new life. The confusing chatter grows less and less. A child
wails, and is hushed in soft Italian--a Neapolitan lullaby--by its
mother as she sits on a convenient bench and for the first time gives
her little one the breast in a strange land. An old Norwegian, perhaps a
lineal descendant of our Viking visitors some thousand years ago, makes
his way to the door, bent beneath a sack-load of bedding; his right hand
holds his old wife's left. They are the last to leave.
The dusk has fallen. To the sea wall again for air after the thousands
of garlic-reeking breaths in old Castle Garden. The sea is dark. The
heavens are deep indigo; against them flashes the Liberty beacon; within
them are set the Eternal Lights. Upon the waters of the harbor the
illumined cabin windows of a multitude of river craft throw quivering
rays along the slow glassy swell.
For a moment on River, and Harbor, and Sound, there is silence. But
behind us we hear the subdued roar and beat of the metropolis, a sound
comparable to naught else on earth or in heaven: the mighty systole and
dyastole of a city's heart, and the tramp, tramp of a million homeward
bound toilers--the marching tune of Civilization's hosts, to which the
feet of the newly arrived immigrants are already keeping time, for they
have crossed the threshold of old Castle Garden and entered the New
World.