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1Author:  Fay Theodore S. (Theodore Sedgwick) 1807-1898Add
 Title:  Norman Leslie  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: A brilliant January morning broke over the beautiful city of New-York. Her two magnificent rivers came sweeping and sparkling down into her immense bay, which, bound in like a lake on every side with circling shores, rolled and flashed in the unclouded sunshine. The town itself rose directly from the bosom of the flood, presenting a scene of singular splendour, which, when the western continent shall be better known to European tourists, will be acknowledged to lose nothing by comparison with the picturesque views of Florence or Naples. Her tapering spires, her domes, cupolas, and housetops, her forest of crowded masts, lay bristling and shining in the transparent atmosphere, and beneath a heaven of deep and unstained blue. The lovely waters which washed three sides of the city were covered with ships of all forms, sizes, and nations; delighting the eye with images of grace, animation, and grandeur. Huge vessels of merchandise lay at rest, in large numbers, all regularly swayed round from their anchors into a uniform position by the heavy tide setting from the rivers to the sea. Others, leaning to the wind, their swollen and snowy canvass broadly spread for their flight over the vast ocean, bounded forward, like youth, bright and confident against the future. Some, entering sea-beaten and weary from remote parts of the globe, might be likened, by the contemplative, to age and wisdom, pitying their bold compeers about to encounter the roar and storm from which they themselves were so glad to escape: and yet, to carry the simile further, even as the human mind, which experience does not always enlighten or adversity subdue, ready, after a brief interval of idleness and repose, to forget the past, and refit themselves for enterprise and danger. Hundreds, whose less perilous duties lay within the gates of the harbour, plied to and fro in every direction, crossing and recrossing each other, and enlivening with delightful animation the broad and busy scene. Of these small craft, indeed, the waves were for ever whitened with an incredible number, in the midst of which thundered heavily the splendid and enormous steamers, beautifully formed to shoot through the flood with arrowy swiftness, their clean bright colours shining in the sun, bearing sometimes a thousand persons on excursions of business and pleasure, spouting forth fire and steam like the monstrous dragons of fable, and leaving long tracks of smoke on the blue heaven. Among other evidences of a great maritime power, reposed several giant vessels of war,—those stern, tremendous messengers of the deep, formed to waft, on the wings of heaven, the thunderbolt of death across the solemn world of waters; but now lying, like fortresses, motionless on the tide, and ready to bear over the globe the friendly pledges or the grave demands of a nation which, in the recollection of some of its surviving citizens, was a submissive colony, without power and without a name. You might deem the magnificent city, thus extended upon the flood, Venice, when that wonderful republic held the commerce of the world. In a greater degree, indeed, than London, notwithstanding the superior amount of shipping possessed by the latter, New-York at first strikes the stranger entering into its harbour with signs of commercial prosperity and wealth. In the mighty British metropolis, the vessels lie locked in dockyards, or half buried under fog and smoke. The narrow Thames presents little more than that portion actually in motion; and, in a sail from Margate to town, the vast number are seen only in succession; but here, the whole crowded, broad, and moving panorama breaks at once upon the eye; and through a perfectly pure and bright atmosphere, nothing can be more striking and exquisite.
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