placed that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best
from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced
the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more
sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in the
other measures of the city's extent."

[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET]

"This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave out
of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the
spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West
Side?"

"I don't, altogether," our friend replied. "Especially I don't leave out
the upper West Side. That has moments of being even beautiful. But there
is a point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is about the
fifteenth story. When you get a group of those sky-scrapers, all soaring
beyond this point, you have, in an inverted phase, the unimpressiveness
which Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect from the summit of a
very lofty mountain. The other day I found myself arrested before a
shop-window by a large photograph labelled 'The Heart of New York.' It
was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you seem to think not
justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it
set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron--heaps, heights,
pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron! Go and look at
that photograph and you will understand. Below those monstrous cliffs
the lower roofs were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms,
gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a conflagration, and the
houses had been burned into the cellars; and the eye sought the
nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire which remains among the ruins
after a great fire. Perhaps this was what made me think of
scrap-iron--heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity
there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but
the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal."

"You strain for a phrase," we said, "as if you felt the essential
unreality of your censure. Aren't you aware that mediaeval Florence,
mediaeval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like
our sky-scrapered New York? They must have looked quite like it."

"And very ugly. It was only when those towers, which were devoted to
party warfare as ours are devoted to business warfare, were leve