Fashion and Famine

Like wild flowers on the mountain side, Goodness may be of any soil; Yet intellect, in all its pride, And energy, with pain and toil, Hath never wrought a holier thing Than Charity in humble birth. God's brightest angel stoops his wing, To meet so much of Heaven on earth. The morning had not fully dawned on New York, yet its approach was visible everywhere amid the fine scenery around the city. The dim shadows piled above Weehawken, were warming up with purple, streaked here and there with threads of rosy gold. The waters of the Hudson heaved and rippled to the glow of yellow and crimson light, that came and went in flashes on each idle curl of the waves. Long Island lay in the near distance like a thick, purplish cloud, through which the dim outline of house, tree, mast and spire loomed mistily, like half-formed objects on a camera obscura. Silence-that strange, dead silence that broods over a scene crowded with slumbering life-lay upon the city, broken only by the rumble of vegetable carts and the jar of milk-cans, as they rolled up from the different ferries; or the half-smothered roar of some steamboat putting into its dock, freighted with sleeping passengers.