In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

CHAPTER 1. I Discover the New World a. The most important room at home was the library. Our house was the usual four-story brownstone segment in the unbroken wall of an upper West Side block. There were plenty of windows. Those to the north looked out upon the street where grocery wagons rattled by day and by night the gas lamps dimly slumbered. Those to the south gave a broad view of another wall of houses which at dark became fantastic with lighted windows holding many secrets and black silhouettes mysteriously alive behind drawn blinds. And beyond the houses was the glow of the great city. The library had but a single window; it was too little for so large and low a room. Even by day the library was dark and, since the window opened on a strip of yard choked by an ugly ailanthus, I never looked through that window. When I was in this room New York did not come in; New York stayed distant and silent. The real world became this world of books; and almost all the books had come from Europe.

Among the pictures on the walls were those of two Americans: Washington and Lincoln. But they had little to do with the America outside the window. They spoke to me less eloquently than the novelists and poets of England, than the thinkers of Germany, than the Athenians and Romans all living on the shelves. This library in my father's house in the city of New York was a sanctuary of Europe. It glowed with a secluded quiet and with a life of its own. And here my childhood lived with an intensity and depth of feeling that not school, not the streets could give me.