The American scene

The following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author’s point of view and his relation to his subject; but I prefix this word on the chance of any suspected or...

What had it been their idea to _do_, the good people—do, exactly, _for_ their manners, their habits, their intercourse, their relations, their pleasures, their general advantage...

Once the whole question had ranged itself under that head—what would the “summer people,” as a highly comprehensive term, do with the aspects (perhaps as a highly comprehensive...

Clearly, none the less, there were puzzles and puzzles, and I had almost immediately the amusement of waking up to another—this one of a different order altogether. The point wa...

I mean in _theirs_ exactly, with as little provision for what is too foul for them as for what is too fair: the very middle, the golden mean, of the note of the common, to which...

This vision, for the moment, of a great dim, clustered but restlessly expansive Harvard, hushed to vacation stillness as to a deep ambitious dream, was, for the impressible stor...

They were not, however, what was now relevant, save in so far as the many-mouthed uproar they recalled was a voice in the more multitudinous modern hum through which one listene...

The hour I first recall was a morning of winter drizzle and mist, of dense fog in the Bay, one of the strangest sights of which I was on my way to enjoy; and I had stopped in th...

Let me not, however, forget, amid such contemplations, what may serve here as a much more relevant instance of the operation of values, the price of the as yet undiminished dign...

The sense of these things became for the hour as the golden glow in which one’s envy burned, and through which, while the sleet and the slosh, and the clangorous charge of cars,...

I must confess, notwithstanding, to not being quite ready to point directly to the common element in the dense Italian neighbourhoods of the lower East side, and in the upper re...

What _does_ become of the various positive properties, on the part of certain of the installed tribes, the good manners, say, among them, as to which the process of shedding and...

A sense of the waste of criticism, however, a sense that is almost in itself consoling, descends upon the fond critic after his vision has fixed the scene awhile in this light o...

There we catch the golden truth which so much of the American world strikes us as positively organized to gainsay, the truth that production takes time, and that the production...

I found it interesting to note, furthermore, that the very Clubs, on whose behalf, if anywhere, expert tradition might have operated, betrayed with a _bonhomie_ touching in the...

The strange thing, moreover, is that the crowd, in the happiest seasons, at favouring hours, the polyglot Hebraic crowd of pedestrians in particular, has, for what it is, none b...

However these things might be, I recall further, as an incident of that hour of “evocation,” the goodly glow, under this same illumination, of an immense red building, off in th...

I was happily to find, at all events, that I had not, on that occasion, done with the Bowery, or with its neighbourhood—as how could one not rejoice to return to an air in which...

This process, one was immediately to perceive with that renewal of impression, this process of injection and elaboration, of creating the palpable pile, had been going on for ye...

Their nostalgia, however exquisite, was, I none the less gather, sterile, for they appear to have left no seed. They must have died, some of them, in order to “go back”—to go ba...

These reflections connect themselves moreover with that most general of his restless hauntings in the United States—not only with the lapse of all wonderment at the immense numb...

This it was after all easy to do from the moment one had determined to concede to the New Land the fact of possession of everything convenient and handsome under heaven. Peace c...

I hung over Concord River then as long as I could, and recalled how Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson himself, have expressed with due sympathy the sense of this full, slow, sleepy, m...

To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-coloured picture of things—is to be sub...

This struck me (on my looking back afterwards with more knowledge) as admirable, as heroic, in its way, and as falling in altogether with inherent habits of sociability, gaiety,...

It was a savour of which, at any rate, for one’s own draught, one could but make the most; and I went so far, on this occasion, as fairly to taste it there in the very quality o...

I arrived late in the day, and the day had been lovely; I alighted at a large fresh peaceful hostelry, imposingly modern yet quietly affable, and, having recognized the deep, so...

No example could speak more of that enlargement of function, for constituting some picture of life, which many an American element or object, many an institution, has to be felt...

I was twice in Washington, the first time for a winter visit, the second to meet the wonderful advance of summer, to which, in that climate of many charms, the first days of May...

What _was_, at all events, better fun, of the finer sort, than having one’s self a stake in the outcome?—what helped the time (so much of it as there was!) more to pass than jus...

The “artistic” Federal city already announced spreads itself then before us, in plans elaborated even to the finer details, a city of palaces and monuments and gardens, symmetri...

It was in conformity with some such induction as the foregoing that I had to feel myself, at Richmond, in the midst of abnormal wintry rigours, take in at every pore a Southern...

The extent to which the American air affects one as a non-conductor of such pretensions is, in the presence of these heterogeneous objects, a constant lively lesson. Looking for...

This was a question, however, that it naturally concerned me not to put to the old mutilated Confederate soldier who, trafficking in photographs in a corner of the room, rejoice...

That had really sufficed, no doubt, for my second initiation; since I remember withdrawing, after my fruitless question, as on the completion of a mystic process. Initiation int...

There were two other places, I may add, where one could but work the impression for all it was, in the modern phrase, “worth,” and where I had, I may venture to say, the sense o...

No kind of person—that was the admonition—is a very good kind, and still less a very pleasing kind, when its education has not been made to some extent by contact with other kin...

This took the form, for me, at that hungry climax, at the end of the long ordeal of the buffet-car, of a refusal of all food that night; a rigour so inexorable that, had it not...

As it was, one came back soon enough, back to one’s proper business: which appeared to be, urgently, strictly, severely, the pursuit of the boarders up and down the long corrido...

“I see what you are _not_ making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not; and how can I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?—which appears never so welcome to you, for its me...

George Cruikshank. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). Robert Seymour. John Leech. R. W. Buss. C. R. Leslie, R.A. Frank Stone, A.R.A. T. Webster, R.A. George Cattermole. Daniel Maclise, R....