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Spring in the Square! The central fountain is playing again its rainbow jet of spray, the tulips are a jaunty ring about it, the benches have put forth a strange, sad foliage of humanity (you must not think too much of the benches nor look at them too long!), the shrill children are everywhere, the green ‘busses are gay with sight-seers atop, and as you stand by the fountain and look northward through the Washington Arch, you see that an amazing thing has come to pass. The great arch spans the vista of the Avenue, lined here with red brick dwellings and the sunny white bulk of the old Brevoort House. Far off, the sky-scrapers begin to loom, whipping out flags and steam plumes. It is a treeless vista, yet it is hazed with spring! Imagination, you scoff–and dust. Yet you look again, and it is not imagination, and it is not dust. It is the veil of spring, cast with delicate hand over the city. These laughing sight-seers atop the green ‘bus now going under the arch feel it, too. These children screaming round your feet, as they dash through the wind-borne fountain spray, are aware of it. There is an answering benignity in the calm, red brick dwellings up the vista of the Avenue. Wait for a few hours, let the sun sink behind the heights of Hoboken, and then wander once more into the Square. Twilight, a warm, balmy twilight, is upon your spirit. Look through the arch southward now. There is still plenty of light left in the sky, but the great, springing, Roman masonry is dusky. It frames the sweeping curve of the asphalt around the fountain, and beyond that the Judson Memorial tower, graceful, Italian, bearing its electric cross against the failing day like a cluster of timid evening stars. It is a tower from the plains of Lombardy, or from an island in the Tiber, seen through an arch of ancient Rome. Do you object to that in an American city? I cannot argue the point. I only know that when I see them so, the one framing the other, in the spring twilight, or in the early dusk of a winter day, my heart is very glad, and my spirit feels a touch of that peace and calm the poet felt among the Roman ruins,

“Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles
Miles on miles….”

How often in New York it is a tower which gathers the picture together! Ours is a city of towers. We hide Trinity spire in a well, and Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright, once complained that the windows of his hotel room on the Avenue looked down upon the pinnacle of a church steeple. Yet our towers rise just the same, new ones leaping up as far above the new three-hundred-foot sky-line as Trinity steeple once lifted above lower Broadway. We aspire still. Nor is the old Judson tower on Washington Square yet dwarfed. How many red sunsets have I seen glow through its belfry windows, while the tower itself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowy Square the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched by a shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In how many deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresher breath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square below me, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps, the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the far heights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark, silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like a star-cluster in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its beautiful image behind my eyelids.