Bayrd Still is, worth] of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate."62 Could it be that this explains why it was that when O. Henry finally found the voice of New York City it was a voice that only he as an individual could hear?a Perhaps it is paradoxical that, in a community so characterized by change, the major attributes of New York City's personality have remained, over the years, essentially the same. Asa Greene's A Glance at New York, published in 1837, reflects the variety, vigor, and animation of a New York that, in many ways, was not unlike the city of the present day. "New York is a very great city," he wrote in the mid-i83os; "a very populous city; a very expensive city; a very scarce-of-hotels city; a remarkably religious city; a sadly overrun-with-law-and-physic city; a surprisingly newspaperial city; an uncommon badly watered city; a very considerable of a rum city; a very full-of-fires city; a pretty tolerably well-hoaxed city; and, moreover, a city moderately abounding in foul streets, rogues, dandies, mobs, and several other things concerning which it is not necessary to come to any specific conclusion."64 In quality, if not always in appearance, Mayor Wagner's New York has much in common with the incipient metropolis of Andrew Jackson's day. It has, even, many of the characteristics which impressed observers as early as the 165os, when peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant was stumping irascibly around the crooked streets of New Amsterdam. In Stuyvesant's day, Dutch burghers fraternized in the town tavern, earth-bound at the river's edge. Three centuries later, their descendants are lifted seventy stories, on occasion, to socialize closer to the stars. But, in spirit, the community in either era has been essentially the same. From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, contemporaries have found it to be prevailingly commercial, convivial, cosmopolitan, socially tolerant, and almost constantly in a state of change. So persistently have commentators attributed these qualities to the community as to suggest that they do, indeed, constitute the "essence" of New York. 62 Walt Whitman, Specimen Days & Collect (Philadelphia: 1882-1883), 117. 68 O. Henry, "The Voice of the City," quoted in Klein, 404. 84 [Asa Greene,] A Glance at New York (New York: 1837), 263-64. 42 3