THE ROAR OF A GREAT CITY

WHEN Hogarth painted his story of “The Enraged Musician,” whose music was drowned in the thousand cries and noises that surrounded him; when Chambers described “The Roar of a Great City,” the blending of a thousand noises, it was of the city of the past they told. Since then this roar has been growing louder and louder, ­until now, miles away, even ­before you see the smoky coronet that surrounds the modern city, you can hear a wild growl like that of some enraged beast. N­either Hogarth nor Chambers dreamed of the fierce whistle of the steamboat and locomotive, of the ­rattle of engine and ma­chin­e­ry, or the cannonade as a cotton float flies over the granite pavement, or the stunning noise of the New York Elevated Railroad. All these have come of late years.

The electric light, the telephone and telegraph wires have added new music to our city. When the winds blow at night one can hear a sombre, melancholy music high up in the air—as mysterious as that of Ariel himself or the undiscovered music of the Pascagoula. If you want to hear it in perfection go some of these windy nights we have lately enjoyed to Delord or Dryades, or some of the streets in the neighborhood of the electric light works, where the wires are numerous and the houses low, and where there is a clean sweep for the wind from the New Basin to the river. There the music ­becomes wild and grand indeed. The storm whistling and shrieking around some sharp corner never equalled it. Above, around, in every direction can be heard this music, sighing, mourning like the tree tops, with a buzzing metallic sound that ­almost drowns your conversation. There is something in it weird and melancholy—it is like the last wail of a dying man, or the shriek of the angel of death as he clasps his victim to him.

If such it is to-day, what have we to hope for in the future? If the city is ­already a monstrous spider web, a great Æolian harp, what is its destiny with several new telegraph and telephone companies, and thousands of new poles, and millions of new wires prom­ised us. If this aerial music increases, this shrieking and wailing and moaning will reach such a pitch that we will greet the ­rattle of the floats and tinkle of the street cars as tending to drown this new noise, and welcome the roar of the city as likely to muffle its moaning.

Times-Dem­ocrat (New ­Orleans), November 30, 1884