New York Sun

“ Since the Sun began to shine upon the citizens of New York there has been a very great and decided change in the condition of the laboring classes and the mechanics, Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, reads the Sun; nor can even a boy be found in New York City or the neighboring country who will not know in the course of the day what is promulgated in the Sun in the morning. ”

“ These printers and compositors were an intelligent body of men, seeking always to benefit their condition and studiously alive to the new ideas with which the country was then teeming.
With the founding of the New York Sun, we come to consider the history of great popular institutions. Older newspapers came to have something of the same influence as the Sun, notably the Evening Post, under Bryant and later under Godkin. But the Sun was the first popular paper; its story, as Mr. Edward P. Mitchell
has said, is that of a living thing, altogether aside from the men who made it. ”

“ Judge CONNOLLY, after walking all the way from Yorkville, agrees with the Sun in believing, that something more than an umbrella tempted this young MONTMORENCY PADREGON to waylay EDWIN WOOD. To-morrow we shall give the public still further exclusive revelations, such as the immense circulation of the New York Sun enables us especially to obtain. ”

“ And now, once more, New York, we are in thy busy streets. It is a pleasant evening in early September. The soft rays of an autumn sun are tinging the western sky, and night is fast drawing her sable mantle over the scene. In Washington Square, near where the tiny fountain jets its stream into a round, grassy-bordered basin, there sits a man of middle stature, apparently in deep study. ”

“ There's nothing to New York except cement, iron girders, noise, and zinc garbage cans. You never see the sun in New York; you never see the moon unless you stand in the middle of the street and bend backward. ”

“ The curious effect on American journalism of the conflict between Sun methods and the so-called new journalism was referred to, in an address delivered at Yale University on January 12, 1903, by Frank A. Munsey, then owner of the New York Daily News and now proprietor of the Sun:
The newspaperman of to-day is a composite type, the product of the Sun and the New York World of fifteen or eighteen years ago. ”

“ And in modern times they seem dark and gloomy, near the bottom, even in the clear, smokeless air of Manhattan, so that lights are turned on sometimes at mid-day, for at best the sun gets into these valleys for only a few minutes, so high have the tall buildings grown. ”

“ Already can we perceive a change in the mass of the people. They think, talk, and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel that they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success.
The Sun newspaper has probably done more to benefit the community by enlightening the minds of the common people than all the other papers together.
Day found New York journalism a pot of cold, stale water, and left it a boiling caldron ”

“ Another walked “on both sides of the street, like a twopenny postman,” while a third “spent his money at a theatre with females,” while his family was in want. But, added the Sun, “we never let personalities creep in.”
The New York Times—not the present Times—had also started up, and it dared to boast of a circulation “greater than any in the city except the Courier.” Said the Sun:
If the daily circulation of the Sun be not larger than that of the Times and Courier both, then may we be hung up by the ears and flogged to death with a rattle-snake’s skin. ”

“ A boy, whose name is unknown to fame, assisted him at devil’s work. A journeyman printer, Parmlee, helped25 with the press when the last quoin had been made tight in the fourth and last of the little pages.
The sun was well up in the sky before its namesake of New York came slowly, hesitatingly, almost sadly, up over the horizon of journalism—never to set! In the years to follow, the Sun was to have changes in ownership, in policy, in size, and in style, but no week-day was to come when it could not shine. ”

“ New York, Sunday Night, January 19.
Have been spending the whole day in reading the Sunday papers.
I am never tired of reading and studying the American newspapers. The whole character of the nation is there: Spirit of enterprise, liveliness, childishness, inquisitiveness, deep interest in everything that is human, fun and humor, indiscretion, love of gossip, brightness. ”

“ In July, 1871, when the New York Times was fortunate enough to have put in its hands the proof of what everybody already suspected—that Senator Tweed, Comptroller Connolly, Park Commissioner Sweeny, and their associates were plundering the city—the Sun was busy with its own pet news and political articles, the investigation of the Orange riots and the extravagance and nepotism of President Grant’s administration. ”

“ I was born there, and when I wish to rest and get away from the noise and turmoil of New York, I go there and grow a younger and a better man amid the Sunday stillness which reigns perpetually in its streets. ”

“ Yesterday--the hottest day of the season--we set out for New York. I thought it was going to be sultry, when, as we passed Washington Square before sunrise, on our way to the boat, I saw the blue haze among the trees, as still and soft and hay-scented as if in the country. Ben often quotes an old Scotch proverb,--"Daylight will peep through a sma' hole." So beauty will peep through every small corner that is left to Nature, even under severe restrictions. ”

“ SUMTER has fallen at last. So much may be accepted. Before many hours I hope to stand amid the ruins of a spot which will probably become historic, and has already made more noise in the world than its guns, gallant as the defence may have been. The news will produce an extraordinary impression at New York—it will disconcert stock-jobbers, and derange the most ingenious speculations. ”

“ There is a stirring vitality of busy life about this your city of New York, striking with astonishment the stranger's mind. How great is the progress of Humanity! Its steps are counted by centuries, and yet while countless millions stand almost at the same point where they stood, and some even have declined since America first emerged out of an unexplored darkness which had covered her for thousands of years, like the gem in the sea ”

“ Early in the morning I have hit the beautiful mountains, and, whirling through pleasant villages and thriving towns, finally skirting lovely meadows and broad marsh-lands, I have come to this busy, bustling city of New York. ”

“ On the morning of the fourth of that month, after an anxious and most perilous but safe journey, I found myself in the big city of New York, a FREE MAN—one more added to the mighty throng which, like the confused waves of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway. ”

“ She had thoroughly enjoyed her first winter in New York society, and was slangy, pert, calmly determined to be amused and as equally determined to hold her head high, quite capable of taking care of herself, a democrat by association and a philosopher by a native shrewdness, amusing and amused. ”

“ Where is New York, the high city of clangour and infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed? ”

“ It is a blaze of lights and mirrors at night, and there is a cliquetis of steel, plate, and glass, a coming and going of ladies and gentlemen in evening dress, a constant movement and an animation in the corridors and approaches, which make one think that, if they be always in force, New York must be in a state of perpetual festivity and luxurious enjoyment. ”

“ But in a city where more or less strikingly pretty women, bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries of Kentucky's July—in New York no one would have given her a second look, this quiet young woman screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement. ”

“ The reader will understand that I despise these “yellows”; they are utterly without honor, they are vulgar and cruel; and yet, in spite of all their vices, I count them less dangerous to society than the so-called “respectable” papers, which pretend to all the virtues, and set the smug and pious tone for good society—papers like the “New York 84Tribune” and the “Boston Evening Transcript” and the “Baltimore Sun,” which are read by rich old gentlemen and maiden aunts, and can hardly ever be forced to admit to their columns any new or vital event or opinion. These are “kept” ”

“ Lamenting over his broken fortunes, and mourning for his poor Italy, he sauntered, upon a certain day, into the Garden of Plants, upon the further side of the Seine. It is a place where the neighboring world go to breathe the air of woods, and to relieve the stifling atmosphere of the city, with the openness and freedom of Nature. (In parenthesis, let us ask, when shall New York civilization reach such a kind provision for life?) ”

“ Bronzed faces from sea and mountains thronged the streets, health and light-heartedness showed in every eye, for autumn in New York wields a potent magic not to be denied, and even the East Side slums, where the unfortunates crowd in their squalid thousands, bad the appearance of having been swept and cleansed. ”

“ The air swarms, to intensity, with the characteristic, the characteristic condensed and accumulated as he rarely elsewhere has had the luck to find it. It jumps out to meet his every glance, and this unanimity of its spring, of all its aspects and voices, is what I just now referred to as the essence of the loud New York story. That effect of violence in the whole communication, at which I thus hint, results from the inordinate mass, the quantity of presence, as it were, of the testimony heaped together for emphasis of the wondrous moral. ”

“ I have been on the Elevated—the huge shuttle of the great city—hour by hour, had my soul woven into New York on it, back and forth, up and down, until it was hardly a soul at all, a mere ganglion, a quivering, pressed-in nerve of second-story windows, skies of clotheslines, pale faces, mist and rumble and dust. “Perhaps I have a soul,” I say. “Perhaps I have not. Has any one a soul?” When I look at the men I say to myself, “Now I will look at the women,” and when I look at the women I say, “Now I will look at the men.” Then I look at shoes. Men are cheap in New York. ”

“ It was such an afternoon as comes rarely, even in the exhilarating winter of New York—an afternoon when the unfathomable blue of the sky overhead runs through all the gamut of tones from lavender to indigo; when the air has the living keenness of that which the Spirit first breathed into the nostrils of man; when the rapture of the heart is that of neither passion, wine, nor nervous excitement, but comes nearer the exaltation of deathless youth in a deathless world than anything else in a temporary earth. ”

“ But he wasn't thinking about that; it was what he had to do when he arrived there: watch a woman—whom he considered a very nice woman—in a lawsuit with a shoemaker; have a talk with each of them, get both sides of the matter, and write a good story, with facetious, satirical touches in it, for New York to smile over the next morning at breakfast. ”

“ A man who can locate a woman in this great city of ours with no other clew than five spangles, dropped from her gown, will certainly make this parasol tell the name of its owner."
"Ah, madam, the credit of this feat is not due to me. It was the initial stroke of a young man I propose to adopt into my home and heart; the same who brought you here to-night. Not much to look at, madam, but promising, very promising. But I doubt if even he can discover the young lady you mean, with no other aid than is given by this parasol. New York is a big place, ma'am, a big place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life and the world are before them, bright with the promise of morning. So to me seem the skies at home. Not lightly do I say it, for I have known the toil of rough-hewing it on the pioneer line that turns men's hair gray; but I have seen also the reward of the toil. New York is the youngest of the world's great cities, barely yet out of knickerbockers. It may be that our century will yet see it as the greatest of them all. ”

“ But if you believe that there is also an inherent, characteristic beauty in the material manifestations of the spirit of our own new, vigorous, fearless republic—and whether you do or not, if you care to look at one of these sudden contrasts referred to—not a stone's throw farther up the water-front there is a notable sight of newest New York. ”

“ One could talk of “quietness” now, for the shrinkage of life so marked, in the higher latitudes of the town, after Easter, the visible early flight of that “society” which, by the old custom, used never to budge before 90June or July, had almost the effect of clearing some of the streets, and indeed of suggesting that a truly clear New York might have an unsuspected charm or two to put forth. An approach to peace and harmony might have been, in a manner, promised, and the sense of other days took advantage of it to steal abroad with a ghostly tread. ”

“ I feel, as I write, that any remarks I make on New York society cannot be perfectly free from bias, owing to the overwhelming kindness and glowing hospitality which I met with in that city. I found so much to enjoy in society, and so much to interest and please everywhere, that when I left New York it was with the wish that the few weeks which I was able to spend there could have been prolonged into as many months. ”