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New York was then in a transition state and just entering upon the new cosmopolitan era which was in some respects a matter of disappointment as well as of pride to men who were, like Duyckinck, born in the old provincial New York which ended with the completion of the Erie Canal and the virtual annexation of the great West in 1825, and who had grown up in what may be called the middle age of New York, from 1826 to 1850, during which the city had become the business metropolis of the country. The third stage of growth was a little too fast and too far for the comfort of many of the old residents, and when, in 1850, the Knickerbocker city, proud of her Croton water, her great daily papers, and her extending railways, established her own line of steamers to Europe, and started her own fleets to the Golden Gate of California, the fear was expressed that the new city was outgrowing her history and its landmarks, and falling into the hands of a new multitude, most of whose half million of people knew little and cared less for the old fathers of Manhattan. Mr. Duyckinck had much of the old fashioned sentiment, yet he kept up with the new progress, and at heart he was quite modern in his love of liberality in literature and politics as well as in religion.
It gives his position and career a certain definiteness to indicate his place and associations during the forming period of his career. His father, Evert Duyckinck, who was for about forty years a bookseller, and died in 1833, had his house at No. 9 Old Slip, and his store adjoined it in Water Street in the rear, far down town in Old New York; and there too, not far distant, was Columbia College, in College Place, at its intersection by Park Place, where the son Evert received his academical education, and became a graduate of 1835. He afterwards lived in the new quarter which the city occupied in its great start from its old home that began about the year 1826, the year when St. Thomas Church, which he afterwards attended, was built, at the corner of Broadway and Houston Street, and the congregation since known by the name of the Church of the Messiah, settled down at the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets near by. In 1849 he still worshipped at St. Thomas Church, although population was crowding upward, and Ascension Church was consecrated in Fifth Avenue in 1841, and Grace Church in Broadway, corner of Tenth Street, in 1846. My own ministry was for fifteen years within a stone's throw from his house (1849–1864), in the Church of the Messiah, which was consecrated in 1839, and abandoned for a more favorable site in 1864. No eyes watched more carefully than his the astonishing growth of the city since it began to pass upwards towards the Harlem river with such speed and grandeur; and the fact that he chose for the resting-place of his books the Lenox Library, so far up and midway in the line of the Central Park, is proof that this loyal Knickerbocker had no churlish quarrel with the spirit of the nine-
