City life

“ THE CITY’S HEART
“Bosh!” said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, “all bosh! A city has no heart. It’s incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet’s dream, my good fellow; pretty but moonshine!”
We turned the corner of the tenement street as he spoke. ”

“ But the physical conditions of the city life are so novel to them, the bustle and violence of it all so insistent, the effect of the mechanical labour, the little leisure, mostly consumed in transit, the grey, similar streets of tiny houses so desolating, that it is hard to stimulate a high political, social, or religious aspiration. ”

“ No one in all that great, splendid city cared in the least whether they lived or died, whether they suffered from hunger or thirst, or whether they had a place to lay their heads at night. But they kept brave hearts, got what they could to eat, slept where they could at night, and spent the days in wandering through the streets and getting acquainted with the life of a great city. ”

“ The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate qualities to full and free expression. ”

“ Under the complex influences of the city life what may be called the normal neighborhood sentiment has undergone many curious and interesting changes, and produced many unusual types of local communities. ”

“ As I say, that is pretty near all you know of the great, marvellous, multitudinous town you live in—a city full of strange people, of strange occupations, of strange habits of life, of strange contrasts of wealth and poverty; of a new life of an indescribable crudity, and of an [Pg 181] old life that breeds to-day the very atmosphere of the historic past. Your feet have never strayed in the side paths where you might have learned something of the infinite and curious strangeness of this strange city. ”

“ All this tends to give to city life a superficial and adventitious character; it tends to complicate social relationships and to produce new and divergent individual types. It introduces, at the same time, an element of chance and adventure, which adds to the stimulus of city life and gives it for young and fresh nerves a peculiar attractiveness. ”

“ The city has many charms and many conveniences as a place of residence; and there are those who, having accustomed themselves to the methods of life that prevail among the dense populations of the great towns, can hardly find happiness and comfort elsewhere. ”

“ Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. ”

“ Finally and supremely arises the City proper—its individuality dependent upon the measure and form in which ideals are expressed and harmonised in social life and polity, ideas synthetised in culture, and beauty carried outwards from the study or chamber of the recluse into the world of art. ”

“ The beautiful forest trees had been cut down and a city was made where once the wild strawberries and June roses grew, even the Company's garden where we school children used to go and ride the horses around the field, was all changed into a city. ”

“ Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. ”

“ The city had a place to fill, a work to do. Doubtless the country places would not have approximated their livableness had it not been for the cities. By crowding together, men have learned some secrets. They would never have learned them alone in the country. Sanitation, lighting, social organization--all these are products of men's experience in the city. ”

“ “Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection.” ”

“ In the country one sees only Nature's fair works, and one's soul is not saddened by the cruel struggle for mere existence that goes on in the crowded city. ”

“ The sun and the air are God's free gifts to all we say, but are they so? In yonder city's dingy alleys the sun shines not, and the air is foul. Oh, man, how dost thou forget and obstruct thy brother man, and say, "Give us this day our daily bread," when he has none! Oh, would that men would leave the city, its splendour and its tumult and its gold, and return to wood and field and simple, honest living! Then would their children grow stately as noble trees, and their thoughts sweet and pure as wayside flowers. ”

“ “I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station—with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries,” Dr. ”

“ I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
That's how I saw it, and see it still. ”

“ What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? ”

“ In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. ”

“ To this ideal unity of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds, with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the corresponding defects in detail. ”

“ I used to camp right where we stand, among these motor cars, and silence brooded o'er the land, as I lay 'neath the stars, save when the drowsy cattle lowed, or when a broncho neighed; and now you have an asphalt road, and palaces of trade! We hear the clamor of the host on every wind that blows, when people take the time to boast of how their city grows! I do not doubt that you will rise to greater heights of fame, and maybe paint across the skies your city's lustrous name! ”

“ The city until recently has occupied a very isolated position, and has depended upon itself for society. It is therefore sociable, friendly, and hospitable; and though there is gossip—for where is it not to be found?—I never knew any in which there was so little of ill-nature. The little world in the upper part of the city is probably the most brilliant to be found anywhere in so small a compass. ”

“ Any lover of the city could live as far out as this. I have no quarrel with the city as a place to work in. Cities are as necessary as wheat-fields and as lovely, too—from twenty miles away, or from Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The city is as a head to the body, the nervous centre where the multitudinous sensations are organized and directed, where the multitudinous and interrelated interests of the round world are directed. The city is necessary; city work is necessary; but less and less is city living necessary. ”

“ Never did he tire when his theme was of that City “whose inhabitants no census has numbered; through whose streets rush no tides of business; that city without grief or graves—sins or sorrows; whose walls are salvation, and whose gates are praise.” ”

“ As the city grows, it must of necessity climb the steep bluffs by which it is encompassed; and on these it is not too much to imagine, at no far period, the squares, terraces, and crescents of a wealthy and public-spirited community ”

“ In this day of great wealth and wonderful inventions we realize more and more the value of the city to mankind, and the quality of the city as a means of culture. Cities are not merely marts of commerce; they stand for civility; they are civilization itself. No untried naked Adam in Eden might ever pass for a civilized man. The city street is the school of philosophy, of art, of letters; city society is the home of refinement. When the rustic visits the city he puts on his best clothes and his best manners. ”

“ Thus flippantly do some of the younger sons of men blaspheme this metropolis of the mid-West—a city the creation of which is, by many persons of discrimination, held to be the chief romance and abiding miracle of the nineteenth century. ”

“ A few short hours, and we shall again be merged in the ceaseless din of the city; the fair and tranquil face of nature change for the anxious countenances of our fellow-men; the joyous carol of the birds, the soft forest breeze, and the sea-beach ripple, for paved streets and our daily round of duty and of labour. ”

“ To-day the city is the same city no longer, nor is the man who writes this the market boy who toiled up the long hill in the blossoming spring, with the seeds of the future quickening in brain and heart. ”

“ The city is majestical with its broad streets, white stone palaces and stately mansions, its wondrous river and its mighty bridges. The dryness, cleanness, and whiteness of a city that knows no rain; the city gleams in a vast supply of sunshine. ”

“ The sky scraper stands in the heart of the great city. From its top one can see the city, one can hear the city, one can smell the city—the city where men live and work. One can see the crowded streets full of tiny men and tiny automobiles, the riverside with its baby warehouses and its baby docks, the river with its toy bridges and toy giant steamers and tug boats and barges and ferries. The city noise,—the distant, rumbling, grumbling noise,—sounds like the purring of a far-away giant beast. ”

“ All sleeps with that peculiar air of serene majesty known to this city only;—this city that has grown, not out of the necessities of commerce nor the luxuries of wealth, but first out of heroism, then out of faith. ”

“ Street sounds come surging up to us—the hoarse Voice of the City—a confused blur of noise—clanging trolley-cars, rumbling wagons, and familiar cries—all the varied commotion of the home-going hour when the city's buildings are pouring forth their human tide of laborers into the clogged arteries. ”

“ And we plunged into the delicious adventure of exploring a new city, staring into windows as only strangers can, revelling in print-shops as only they do, really seeing the fine buildings as residents always forget to do, and laying up, in short, with those streets, nearly all the associations which to this day we have with them. ”

“ As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist. ”

“ It would seem that a strong current of human interest could be made to flow from the crowded and unwholesome conditions of the city to the open country, where the fresh breezes play and the flowers bloom. At present it is not so. The stream flows in the opposite direction and every year the city swallows up much of the best blood of the country. It is the city that attracts, and the country that repels. ”

“ The magic of the city—whence comes it? Every people, every age has felt it, this mysterious sense of personality, this deep, alluring spell which age after age, nation after nation, has woven round the city of its dreams. ”

“ WHAT WOULD THEY DO?
’Tis true that the city is pleasant,
With its scenes ever varied and new;
But if it were not for the country
Oh, what would the city folks do?
Soon plenty would be superseded
By dearth with its train of distress;
The gaunt wolf would roam by the once happy home
Though riches untold you possess. ”

“ The narrow and irregular streets and well-built houses, some of which still retain the quaint, picturesque gables so reminiscent of earlier times, envelop the city with that delightful, indefinable air of mediævalism—a something which, tempered with old associations and traditions, no modern city with all its improvements can supply. ”

“ For the same reason, the great drama of metropolitan existence falls most forcibly upon those just from the clear streams and green meadows of the country. Their impressions then are deeper, and their feelings more intense than if they were city born and bred. ”