Walter Prichard Eaton

“ There is always a mystery and poignant charm about our parks in New York, if you let them have their way with your imagination, which you do not find in other parks intrinsically, perhaps, more beautiful. No doubt this comes from violent contrast between our city and the hush and peace of trees. Our streets are all treeless, and our great heave of masonry comes up to the very edge of our green oases. Even the smaller parks which fill but a block or two, when twilight enfolds them, blurring the harsher outlines and conjuring out the shadows, can captivate the senses. ”

“ Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords—forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens' bronze Diana.
Snow in the city! We in New York think of bespattered boots, of horses falling down, of dirty piles, more black than white, lining the streets like igloos till the tip-carts come and carry them off. ”

“ 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 less conventional about beauty than about other things. [152] If he believes that the beauty of a city lies in a level cornice-line, converging vistas, malls of trees, “civic centres,” of what use to tell him that there may be a beauty as well of non-conformity, when the magic veil of twilight wraps the city round, and twinkling lamps climb unbelievable heights and all the town is a mighty nocturne in blue and gold? ”

“ But how many know that it is probably the one sky-scraper in the world which can gaze at its own reflection in still water, and that to the spectator looking at it over this water-mirror it becomes a gigantic but ethereal Japanese design, even to the pine limb flung across the upper corner?
They say there is an hour at twilight when all men appear noble, and all women beautiful. Certainly there is such a twilight hour when New York City is veiled, oftimes, in loveliness; and most lovely at this hour is the Plaza mirrored in the pool. ”

“ What daffodils we have in that month of alternate slush and blizzard bloom in pots, indoors. But one sign of spring the gardens holds no less plain to read, even if some people may not regard it as so poetic—over across the late snow, close to the hotbed frames, a great pile of fresh stable manure is steaming like a miniature volcano. To the true gardener, that sight is thrilling, nay, lyric! I have always found that the measure of a man's (and more especially a woman's) garden love was to be found in his (or her) attitude toward the manure pile. ”

“ Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to read poetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as he sees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, his lingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echo of the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed is defective, in the second place, because it has always been the mission of genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly on mankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what the realists choose to consider reality. ”

“ It is as if the city had crested in a great wave along the green shore of the country, ready to curl and fall and dash onward, but had been suddenly arrested by some more potent King Canute. Loveliness, however, is hardly a word you would apply till twilight steals across the scene. Down side streets into the west the golden sunset glows for a time, and the shadows on the snow are amethyst. Then the glow fades. The arc lamps come on with a splutter, and they, too, at first are amethyst. But in the gathering dark they change to blue. The sky changes to the deep blue of approaching night. ”

“ Possibly you think it incongruous, impossible, the picture of happy-go-lucky, ridiculous Bobbie, with his slang and his grin and his outlook on life, and Ruskin, the great critic, the master of style, the intellectual giant. But then you reckon without Bobbie's quality of Penguinity, and without Ruskin's humanness. It is alike impossible to withstand the contagion of Bobbie's Penguinity, and to fancy a genius so great that he does not at times yearn for the common walks and the common talks of his humbler fellow creatures. ”

“ The Twilight Veil New York! How few of us call it home! We have been sucked into it, as into a whirlpool, and as we spin round and round on its mighty unrest our hearts and fancies find repose in memory—the memory of an old New England village, or a corn field and a split-rail fence and then the level prairie, or cotton fields and the red handkerchiefs of the negroes, or the vineyard slopes of Sicily, or the great white surf beating up the cliffs of Connemara. ”

“ In the lowland regions gardening is easier, perhaps, but yet there is a certain joy in this fickle spring weather of ours,—the joy of going out in the morning across a white garden and sweeping the snow from hotbed mats, lifting the moist, steaming glass, and catching from within, strong against your face, the pungent warmth and aroma of the heated soil and the delicate fragrance of young seedlings. How fast the seeds come—some of them! Others come so slowly that the amateur gardener is in despair, and angrily decides to try a new seed house next year. ”

“ The merry host of Penguin Persons who move outside the radius of the spluttering calcium, whose proscenium is the door frame of a home, may earn neither wealth nor fame by doing as he has done, but they will win no less a reward, for they will have lightened for all around them the burdens of life, they will have smoothed the gathering frown and summoned the forgotten laugh, they will have made of the ridiculous a little religion, and out of Penguinity brought peace. ”

“ Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs along upper Broadway, like King Arthur's dragoned helmet, make “all [153] the night a steam of fire,” and round the tall tower of the Times Building the vapour clouds drift, now concealing, now revealing some beam of light from a window high aloft. After all, it is no great credit to any of us to find the ugliness in New York. The ugliness is rather obvious. To find the beauty is a worthier task, and might make us more keen to cherish and to expand it. ”

“ Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth story window and sets it dancing in golden ripples. You may fare far among the ancient and “picturesque” cities of the earth without finding a rival for this strange bit of beauty in New York, an ethereal sky-scraper in white and gold gazing at its own reflection in the forest pool! [140]
Twilight in the Park, indeed, converts more than one building into a thing of beauty, and the Plaza into a thing of beauty from more than one view. ”

“ It is a moment to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like that of finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding them dead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the perennials and biennials were winter-killed, just as a beginner at golf gives up the game forever each time he makes a vile score. Then I began to compromise on a garden of annuals. ”

“ We would not be thought to say that New York is always beautiful, or that a great deal of it is not much of the time ugly beyond hope. But there is not a street of it from end to end but has some point of pictorial charm, whence one may see a span of the Brooklyn Bridge leaping over the tenements, or the scholastic Gothic spire of the City College chapel crowning the rocks at the close of the vista, or just a rosy sunset over the Hoboken hills. ”

“ For I cannot think of this great city of New York as my home, I cannot fit into the rushing, roaring cogs and grooves of its machinery without a protest, without a hope that some day I may hear the wheels no longer roar at their cruel revolutions. Thus my peppermints speak to me of home, of quiet, of certain green places and a lilac hedge; there is about them the taste and odor of the ideal. They are for the future as well as for the past. Perhaps in some subtle way they do after all have potency for beauty. ”

“ Day after day nothing happens, then suddenly, some noon, it has scarcely been set on the ground when its blossoms stir, and it is murmurous with bees. Then we know that spring indeed has come, and we begin to rake the lawns, wherever the frost is out, wheeling great crate loads of leaves and rubbish upon the garden, and filling our neighbors' houses with pungent smoke.
There is a certain spot between the thumb and first finger which neither axe nor golf-club nor saw handle seems to callous. The spring raking finds it out, and gleefully starts to raise a blister. ”

“ And my peppermints are all eaten, too, and the gossamer web of memory dissolves, the picture fades, and I see before me this room of mine, littered with some learned literature but more pipes and prints and miscellaneous rubbish, and I hear outside in the Square, not the spring wind racing among the budding branches, but the coughing of a consumptive motor car, the penetrating squeak of a trolley rounding a curve on a dry track, the irritating jolt of heavy drays, and a great, subdued, never-ceasing rumble and roar, the key-note of the giant city. Only the little bag remains. ”

“ You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be trusted to embroider fact. ”

“ Even if you are unfortunate enough to “tour” in a motor-car, which of course is far from the ideal way to savor the countryside, still you cannot miss the old house on the bend, even though you do miss the feel of the land, the rise and dip of the road, the fragrance of the clematis by the wall, the already fading gold of the evening primroses when you start off after breakfast. ”

“ He was a handsome youth, and I know not what mischief he wrought that winter in gentle bosoms, with his vocabulary enlarged and romanticized, his tones colored with emotion, as he sought secluded corners at our dances and practised his new art. Our Tolstoian moods were not for dances, you may be sure! We lived in a dual universe. In one world were sundials and moonlight and the thrill of a woman's eyes; there was slow music and the ache of unfilled desire ever about to be gratified by some hoped-for miracle. ”

“ There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of taking the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a cold open winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens a long-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. What signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted manure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? ”

“ How much wiser than we they are, who know that life is free and pleasant and full of melody and beautiful things, and dreams more real than reality, and reality born of the dream! Yet we try our best to convince them that they are wrong. We see to it that Longfellow lies about them in their infancy.
But perhaps all this is changed since my day, and the nightmare this battered memory-gem book recalls to my mind is no longer a load on the children of the present. I profoundly hope so. Can it be that the present revival of poetry is due to the passing of the memory-gem book? ”

“ The Penguin Person is not a wit, there is no barb to his shafts of fun, no uneasiness from his preternatural cleverness, for he is not preternaturally clever. You never feel unable to cope with him, you never feel your mind keyed to an unusual alertness to follow him; you feel, indeed, a sense of comforting superiority, for, after all, you do take the world so much more seriously than he! ”

“ I cannot but believe that any poetry long to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that is just what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from my acquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated, vers libre is a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, is swinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probably forgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been prepared anew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. ”

“ We play it because there is some diabolical—or celestial—fascination about the thing; some will-o'-the-wisp of hope lures us over swamp and swale, through pit and pasture, toward the smooth haven of the putting green; some subtle, mysterious power every now and then coördinates our muscles and lets us achieve perfection for a single stroke, whereafter we tingle with remembrance and thrill with anticipation. Golf is the quest of the unattainable, it is a manifestation of the Divine Unrest, it spreads before us the soft green pathway down which we follow the Gleam. ”

“ For instance, as you pass into the Park, seeking the spot we have described, turn back before you have advanced far, and see the great cliff wall going up beyond the slender tracery of young trees, with the street lights, just turned on, making a level strip of golden shimmer at its base, curiously suggestive of crowds and gaiety. There is at all hours a certain charm to be found in the long line of high hotels and apartment houses which line the Park to the west, when you view them over treetops, rock ledges, and running brooks, or over white fields of snow. ”

“ Then as if by magic the drawn faces of all his associates would clear, the night editor would laugh and forget to look at the clock, we would resume our toil, momentarily forgetful of the high pressure under which we labored, and working the better for the forgetfulness; and the Penguin Person, the smile still expanding his mouth, would tilt down his chair and work with us, only faster. ”