regret as he recalls the departed glories
of the Union Club and the jutting brown-stone stoops of yesterday. At
the noon hour the sidewalks swarm with foreign faces. There is shrill
chatter in alien tongues and the air is laden with strange odours. Even
here Bohemia may be. Perhaps, toiling over a machine in one of the
sweat-shops of the towering buildings a true poet may be coining his
dreams and aspirations and heartaches into plaintive song; another, like
the Sidney Rosenfeld of a score of years ago, who, over his work in the
Ghetto of the lower East Side, asked and answered:

"Why do I laugh? Why do I weep?
I do not know; it is too deep."

The attic, the studio, the restaurant, the cafe are the accepted symbols
of Bohemia. What reader of Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"
has ever forgotten the Cafe Momus, where the riotous behaviour of
Marcel, Schaunard, Rodolphe, and Colline brought the proprietor to the
verge of ruin? Who has not in his heart a tender spot for Terre's
Tavern, in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, where the bouillebaisse came
from--the bouillebaisse, of which some of the ingredients were "red
peppers, garlic, saffron roach, and dace"? It is of no great importance
whether the particular scene be on the "_rive gauche_" of the River
Seine, or in the labyrinth of narrow streets that make up the Soho
district of London, or in rapidly shifting New York. All that is needed
is youth, or unwilling middle age still playing at youth, and the
atmosphere where artistic and literary aspirations are in the air, and
poverty wearing a conspicuous stock, and the "glory that was Greece and
the grandeur that was Rome," and the relative merits of Tennyson and
Browning being talked over to the accompaniment of knives and forks
rattling against plates of spaghetti and the clinking of wine glasses.

Years ago, to find the tangible New York Bohemia would have been a
matter of crossing from the Avenue's southern extremity, and diving into
the streets that lie to the south of Washington Square. There was the
old French Quarter, and there foregathered the professional joke-makers
and the machine poets who contributed to "Puck," and the "New York
Ledger" when that periodical felt the guiding hand of Robert Bonner. Of
that group Henry Cuyler Bunner was probably the most conspicuous. In his
early days he was a twenty-four-hour Bohemian. In later life, when he
had moved to the country, he remained a noon Bohemia