Such was the excited and hoping condition of Holden’s mind as the vessel approached the port of New York, which it reached the next morning.  Although then a place of great trade, and giving indubitable promise of what it has since become, New York was far, very far from approaching its present splendor and magnificence, which entitle it to vie with the most brilliant capitals of the world.  Even then the ships of all nations were to be found at its wharfs, but the taper masts rising into the sky, formed not a cordon so immense as that which now, like a forest stripped of its leaves, girts it round.  Nor from even its most fashionable portions, the residence and resort of the wealthy and the gay, had all the humbler buildings, which belonged to its origin, disappeared.  Alongside of the modern brick, or occasionally stone mansion of four stories, that style of architecture, dear yet to the heart of a genuine Knickerbocker of which Holland boasts, if not the invention, at least the perfectioning, reared its pointed gable, and rose like Jacob’s ladder with parapeted roof into the sky.  But slightly injured by weather in a climate singularly clear and pure, under a sky untarnished by the dismal clouds from bituminous coal fires, which enshroud less favored lands, the brave little Dutch bricks held their own with a sturdiness becoming their ancestry.  Those monuments of a simpler age have almost disappeared, and the ingenuity they exhibited, and the taste of which they were the specimens, are likely soon to be remembered only as steps in the worlds pupilage.

But, however the fashions of man may change, the grand features of nature remain eternal.  Beautifully bright then as now sparkled in the light of the May morning sun, the waves of that glorious bay, unrivalled but by one, while little boats and pinnaces darting about in all direction like sea-birds, gave animation to a scene, which without the accompaniment would have possessed peculiar interest to one who, like Holden, had lived so long in seclusion.  As the vessel turned around Castle Garden to seek her berth in the North River, and his eyes ran over the islands and Jersey shore, and up the noble stream, and one by one he recognized the objects he had seen in his youth, it seemed as if feelings, supposed dead, were coming to life, and nature re-assuming the gala garb which she once wore.

But, independent of the causes that made the scene peculiarly attractive to our traveller, it is impossible to approach a large city after a long absence without excitement.  The aggregation of a mass of human beings full of life, and instinct with its hopes, and fears, and joys, and sorrows, and passions, acts like a stimulus.  Nature is beautiful, and art glorious, but the object of deepest interest to man is man himself.  In his fellow beings he sees reflected his own interior world, a world of mystery and marvel, whence any news is welcome that will impart information respecting its light and shade, its harmonies and discords.  He cannot stand outside, a looker-on, separate and apart, having no portion therein:  he is in it and of it, an integral atom, a something which cannot be isolated if it would.