THROUGH BROADWAY.

The incessant demolition of which Broadway is the scene denotes to the most careless eye that devotion to the immediate which De Tocqueville maintains to be a democratic characteristic.  The huge piles of old bricks which block the way—­with their array of placards heralding every grade of popular amusement, from a tragedy of Shakespeare to a negro melody, and from a menagerie to a clairvoyant exhibition, and vaunting every kind of experimental charlatanism, from quack medicine to flash literature—­are mounds of less mystery, but more human meaning, than those which puzzle archaeologists on the Mississippi and the Ohio; for they are the debris of mansions only half a century ago the aristocratic homes of families whose descendants are long since scattered, and whose social prominence and local identity are forgotten, while trade has obliterated every vestige of their roof-tree and association of their hearth-stone.  Such is the constant process.  As private residences give way to stores and offices, the upper portion of the island is crowded with their enlarged dimensions and elaborate luxury; churches are in the same manner sacrificed, until St. Paul’s and Trinity alone remain of the old sacred landmarks; and the suburban feature—­those “fields” where burgomasters foregathered, the militia drilled, and Hamilton’s youthful eloquence roused the people to arms—­is transferred to the other and distant end of Manhattan, and expanded into a vast, variegated, and beautiful rural domain,—­that “the Park” may coincide in extent and attraction with the increase of the population and growth of the city’s area.  Thus a perpetual tide of emigration, and the pressure of the business on the resident section,—­involving change of domicile, substitution of uses, the alternate destruction and erection of buildings, each being larger and more costly in material than its predecessor,—­make the metropolis of the New World appear, to the visitor from the Old, a shifting bivouac rather than a stable city, where hereditary homes are impossible, and nomadic instincts prevalent, and where local associations, such as endear or identify the streets abroad, seem as incongruous as in the Eastern desert or Western woods, whose dwellers “fold their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.”  The absence of the law of primogeniture necessitates the breaking up of estates, and thus facilitates the methods whereby the elegant homestead becomes, in the second or third generation, a dry-goods store, a boarding or club house, a milliner’s show-room or a dentist’s office.  Here and there some venerable gossip will rehearse the triumphs of refined hospitality, or describe the success of a belle or the brilliancy of a genial leader in politics or social pastime, which, years ago, consecrated a mansion or endeared a neighborhood,—­whereof not a visible relic is now discoverable, save in a portrait or reminiscent paper conserved in the archives of the Historical Society.  And in this speedy oblivion of domestic and social landmarks, how easily we find a reason for the national irreverence, and the exclusive interest in the future, which make the life of America, like the streets of her cities, a scene of transition unhallowed by memorials.