The other evening I walked over to the East River through one of the
tenement streets, and I reached the waterside just as the soft night
was beginning to fall in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died
from the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ravined out
of the bank for a street, and experienced that artistic delight which
cultivated people are often proud of feeling, in the aspect of the
long prison island which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew the
buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and women in them, bad
before, could only come out of them worse than before, and doomed to
a life of outlawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each an
image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which men once imagined
that God had prepared for the souls of the damned, but I could not see
the barred windows of those hells in the waning light. I could only
see the trees along their walks; their dim lawns and gardens, and the
castellated forms of the prisons; and the æsthetic sense, which is
careful to keep itself pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable
impression of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, and the vast
steamboats which ply between the city and the New England ports on Long
Island Sound, and daily convey whole populations of passengers between
New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, swiftly, luminous
masses on the black water. Their lights aloft at bow and stern, floated
with them like lambent planets; the lights of lesser craft dipped by,
and came and went in the distance; the lamps of the nearer and farther
shores twinkled into sight, and a peace that ignored all the misery of
it, fell upon the scene.