Across the Atlantic, by the Author of 'Sketches of Cantabs' (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A WALK IN THE BROADWAY. There is one want in America, for which, of course, the Americans are in no way to blame, but which must always be felt in a new country; I mean the want of any scenes or edifices hallowed by a sense of antiquity. It is for this reason that the traveller from the United States takes such a delight in ruins, and will go through unheard-of difficulties to contemplate an object which bears the undoubted stamp of age. It is a new emotion ?thus to see embodied before him a period of the world, which he has hitherto only reached by the aid of fancy. For a partly similar reason, I rather rejoice in the absence of antiquities from the New World. I am glad thai; there is no old cathedral or monument near New York, which I should absolutely be obliged to see before quitting the place, and that my time can be spent in observing active men and manners, not decaying wood and stone. I do not underrate the importance of old things, nor deny that they are capable of elevating and refining the mind. But it is in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, that these pleasures are to besought. We cross the Atlantic, not to contemplate the remains of what has been, but the corner-stone of what is to come, the scaffolding of a new society, instead of the mouldering walls of a grass-grown Tower or Abbey. This is the Broadway up which we are walking starting from Union Square, the most fashionable part of the town. This is the same walk as Mr. Dickens has already taken his reader, it is true; but surely the street is wide enough and large enough for all, for the humblest etcher and sketcher as well as the great novelist. Do not let us be deterred. The same objects may not chance to arrest our attention; or, for aught we know, the aspect of the street may be entirely changed since th...