Worshiping a deification of real estate, and with a rude aristocracy building upon the blood of the sow and the tallow of the bull, its atmosphere discourages one artist while inviting another to rake up the showered rewards of a "boom" patronage.

Feeling that naught but sleepiness and sloth should be censured, it resents even a kindly criticism.

Quick to recognize the feasibility of a scheme; giving money, but holding time as a sacred inheritance.

It is a re-gathering of the forces that peopled America and then made her great among nations; a mighty community with a growing literary force and with its culture and its real love for the beautiful largely confined to the poor in purse; grand in a thousand respects; with its history glaring upon the black sky of night; with the finest boulevards in America and the filthiest alleys--a giant in need of a bath.
The Colossus stood as a towering island with "a tide in the affairs of men" sweeping past.

And it seemed to Henry that the buggy was cast ashore as a piece of driftwood that touches land and finds a lodgment.
At an earlier day, and not so long ago either, the flaw of unconscious irony might have been picked in the name Colossus, but now the establishment, covering almost a block and rising story upon story, filled in the outlines of its pretentious christening.
"Tap, tap, tap--cash, 46; tap, tap--cash, 63," was the leading strain in this din of extensive barter and petty transaction.