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.