Excerpt from The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City: An Address Delivered Before the New York Historical Society on Its Ninety-Ninth Anniversary Genius, an American essayist has said, is not a single power but a combination of great powers. The genius of a city is a power created by a com bination of powers of earth and of air; by its loca tion, the circumstances which determined its earli est activities, the quality and force of the men who laid its foundations, the reflex influence of its leaders in successive generations. And this soul of a city, which gives inspiration, direction, color to its mani fold life attains at last such definite individuality that it IS unconsciously personified and becomes {no genius of the city, the spirit of the locality; that searching, penetrating influence, which broods over childhood, and gathers about itself the senti ment of maturity, and takes on a kind of radiance from the memories of age; an influence which our ancestors of Latin blood embodied in Those lesser deities with whom they lived in the inti macies of the home, the field, the footpath and the spring. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.