It is joyous life and growth
hoping in the most unpromising surroundings: it is eager and gallant
hope exulting in the very teeth of defeat. Do you remember John
Reed's--
_"Below's the barren, grassless, earthen ring
Where Madame, with a faith unwavering
Planted a wistful garden every spring,--
Forever hoped-for,--never blossoming."_
Yet they do blossom, those hidden and usually unfruitful
garden-places. Sometimes they bloom in real flowers that anyone can
see and touch and smell. Sometimes they come only as flowers of the
heart--which, after all, will do as well as another sort,--in
Greenwich Village, where they know how to make believe.
Here is how Hugh Macatamney describes Greenwich:
"A walk through the heart of this interesting locality--the
American quarter, from Fourteenth Street down to Canal, west
of Sixth Avenue--will reveal a moral and physical
cleanliness not found in any other semi-congested part of
New York; an individuality of the positive sort transmitted
from generation to generation; a picturesqueness in its old
houses, 'standing squarely on their right to be individual'
alongside those of modern times, and, above all else, a
truly American atmosphere of the pure kind.
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