June had brought with it a blessed respite from his classes at the university. Now the summer drew on towards its close — the brutal and weary New York summer with its swelter of dead wet heats, its death of hope, its sorrow of a timeless memory. And yet, in the city’s summer nights there was a kind of solemn joy, a hush of peace and light and human resignation that was so different from the wild and nameless joy and pain of spring, the sorrow of autumn, the winter’s grim and stern protraction of the soul. THEN— in these nights of waning summer — more than at any other season of the year, the immense and murmurous sound of time was audible. It was above one and around one, it was near and far, it was immense and omnipresent, and it was indefinable. It seemed to hover somewhere in the upper air, above the city’s steep canyons, the giant explosions of her thousand towers, the swarming millions of her tortured and uneasy life for ever waging their desperate, ugly and unprofitable strife in all her hot and tangled mazes. And that voice of time, above the ugly clamour of that tormented life, was imperturbable; immense, remote and murmurous, it seemed to have resumed into itself all of the rumours of the earth, and to comprise, out of the bitter briefness of man’s days, the essence of his own eternity, and to be itself eternal, fixed, and everlasting, no matter what men lived or died.

The people of the city heard this sound of time, and on these evenings of the waning summer their lives were subject to its spell. For the first time in many months one heard the sounds of quiet laughter in the streets at night, the voices of the people as they passed were strangely hushed, the sounds of life were immense, all murmurous as time itself.

This sense of peace, of resignation, of a quiet and tranquil sorrow and joy was everywhere; it may have been some quality of the summer air that imposed on all the violence of the city’s life a kind of muted harmony, but the spirit of this peace seemed to have entered the very flesh and spirit of the city, somehow to have tranquillized the feverish blood and nervous and exacerbated bodies of its people. For the first time in months their eyes were quiet and thoughtful and had lost their look of hatred and suspicion, hostility and mistrust. Their faces had lost their strained, hard, and hurried look, even their tongues had lost some of their strident, rasping, and abusive violence.

That immense and murmurous hush of time and sorrowful acceptance had touched even the life of youth. At night one still saw groups of young men walking through the streets, but even they had somehow been subdued and chastened by this spell of time. And in these bands of youth — these straggling bands of young men who struggle through the city streets at night in groups of six or eight, and who have become so much a part of our familiar experience and the city’s life that they no longer seem curious to us — the change that this great spell of time had wrought was perhaps more evident than anywhere else.

Where were the songs of youth upon those city streets? Where the laughter, the wild spontaneous mirth, the passion, warmth and golden poetry of youth? Where was the great boy Jason looking for brothers in the fellowship of that inspired adventure of man’s youth — the proud, deathless image of what all of us desire when young: where was it? Where were the noble thoughts and ardours of young men, the fierce and bitter desperation and the proud and foolish hopes, the grand dreams and the music of the fleeting and impossible reveries — all that makes youth lovely and desirable, and that keeps man’s faith — where was it among these young men on the city streets?

It was not there. Poor sallow, dark, swarthy creatures that they were, with rasping tongues, loose mouths and ugly jeering eyes, this infamous band of youth was death-inlife itself. It had been brought still-born from its mother’s womb into a world of city str............