hich rise beyond, a gray wall of misty shadow, the eye is satisfied
with a clean, well-composed, strongly lined picture, and the
imagination almost deluded into a belief of its rusticity.

I remember once walking down Broadway late at night, after an evening
at some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdry
restaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a "good
time," and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. The
night was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively few
pedestrians, and those few were not of the sort to dispel my
despondent mood.

"Back home," I thought, "the moon should be shining on the white,
clean hills, and underneath my boots the snow-crust would squeak.
Perhaps a screech-owl would whistle his plaintive call in the ghostly
orchard. How beautiful there the night would be! But here--" and I
flung out my arm instinctively toward the walls which hemmed me in.

But as I drew near Madison Square, and lifted my eyes to the soaring
ship's-prow of the Flatiron Building, I noted suddenly that its upper
stories were bathed in a pale, golden glow; and coming full into the
square, I saw the moon, riding small and high beyond the white tower.
The next strip of canyon street shut it out once more, but at Union
Square it was waiting to greet me, and as I entered the slit of
Broadway to the south and drew near Eleventh street, I was aware of
the snow-covered northward pitch of Grace Church roof gleaming in its
light, a great rectangle of pale radiance at the bend of the street.
Above the roof the Gothic spire stood up serenely. There were no
passers at the moment, not even a trolley-car. The greatest traffic
artery in town was hushed as death. The high buildings about were dark
and shadowy. At the angle commanding the vista in either direction the
church slept in the moonlight.

"Deep on the convent roof the snows
Are sparking to the moon."

Tennyson's lines came to me instinctively, for here in the heart of
town was their very picture and their simple magic. A little
shamefaced for my sceptic blindness, I passed on toward home.

Somebody, probably Emerson, said that we bring from Europe only what
we take to it. But need one go to Europe to demonstrate the principle?
We in New York, who are often our city's harshest critics, find pretty
much what we look for. We do not look for beauty, and we do not find
it. Then, too, man is no les