LETTER X
New York in Spring--Central Park--New York not an Ill-governed City--The
United States Post Office--The Express System--Valedictory.
NEW YORK.
It is with a curious sensation of home-coming that I find myself once
more in New York. Spring has arrived before me. The blue dome of sky has
lost its crystalline sparkle, and the trees in Madison-square have put
on a filmy veil of green. Going to a luncheon party in the Riverside
region, I determine, for the sheer pleasure and exhilaration of the
thing, to walk the whole way, up Fifth-avenue and diagonally across
Central Park. What a magnificent pleasure ground, vast, various, and
seductive! A peerless emerald on the finger of Manhattan! If I were not
bound by solemn oaths to present myself at West-End-avenue at half-past
one, I could loaf all the afternoon by the superb expanse of the Croton
Reservoir, looking out over the giant city of sunshine, with the white
dome of Columbia College and the pyramid of Grant's Monument on the
northern horizon, and far to the eastward the low hills of Long Island.
Passing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I am reminded, not only that I
have never been inside it, but that in all the cities I have visited I
have not gone to a single show-place, museum, or picture-gallery, save
one remarkable private collection in Baltimore.
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