quote of the week

“At the Forty-second Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long stretch of the elevated to north and south. The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights: the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them: and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam – formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles[...]; but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it.”
(William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890))