Of the fifteen or sixteen avenues of the City, Fifth is known as the Avenue by way of distinction. It is, by all odds, the most handsome and exclusive street of the Metropolis, the only one that has thus far resisted the encroachments of trade and railways, and defied the peculiar regulations of our municipal government. Every few months an innovation is attempted upon the fashionable thoroughfare, which has too much strength, through its wealth, to submit to any vulgar alteration in its settled courses.

Fifth avenue exclusiveness must be purchased at large prices; for it always offers temptations to private speculators and corrupt legislators. It even prefers fashion to fortune, for the reason that it has more of the latter than the former, and it would rather be over-generous than under-genteel.

"Let me alone; let me be as I want to," says the Avenue to outside barbarians, in nervous anxiety, its hand upon its purse, "and I will pay without stint the most exorbitant of demands."

Street railways are the periodic terror of the Avenue. Though loud threats are made to put them there, there is little danger of their establishment; for the prosperous quarter knows better than Walpole that few men fail to be convinced by monetary arguments. Who has the most money wins in New York, where the long as well as the short race is to the fullest purse.

Whenever a house is for sale or rent in the Avenue, its residents feel a profound interest in the character of the inmates that are to be. They dread lest the mansion may be converted to unworthy uses; lest they may be hourly shocked by a plebeian neighbor who is what they themselves were twenty, or five years, or perhaps a few months before. Their vigilance is sleepless in this regard, still they have often been compelled to buy out common tradesmen, and ambitious courtesans, and enterprising blacklegs, who had purchased an abiding place in the socially sacred vicinage. There have been those whom bank accounts and bank checks could not persuade. Madame Restell, the notorious abortionist, and gamblers by the score, and Cyprians by the dozen, have penetrated into the street, and cannot be gotten rid of for largess or for logic.

Yet the energy and munificence of the Avenue, in the endeavor to keep out the unanointed, is commendable from its stand-point, and in another direction, would be productive of no little good. It is a defect of our perception that we expend our strength against the current of events.

It is the habit of New Yorkers to style Fifth avenue the first street in America. So far as wealth, and extent and uniformity and buildings go, it probably is. But in situation, it is far inferior to many thoroughfares I might name. Beginning at Washington square, it extends above Harlem; and, far as Fifty-ninth street, it is almost an unbroken line of brown-stone palaces. The architecture is not only impressive, it is oppressive. Its great defect is in its monotony, which soon grows tiresome. A variation, a contrast something much less ornate or elaborate would be a relief. Its lack of enclosures, of ground, of grass plats, of gardens is a visual vice.

Block after block, mile upon mile, of the same lofty brown-stone, high-stoop, broad-staired fronts wearies the eye. It is like the perpetual red brick, with white steps and white door and window facings for which Philadelphia has become proverbial.

One longs in the Avenue for more marble, more brick, more iron, more wood even some change in the style and aspects of the somber-seeming houses, whose occupants, one fancies from the exterior, look, think, dress and act alike. One might go, it appears, into any drawing-room between the Park and old Parade-ground, and he would be greeted with the same forms; see the same gestures; hear the same speeches.

The stately mansions give the impression that they have all dreamed the same dream of beauty the same night, and in the morning have found it realized; so they frown sternly upon one another, for each has what the other wished, and should have had alone.

The slavish spirit of imitation, with poverty of invention, has spoiled the broad thoroughfare where we should have had the Moorish and Gothic, Ionic and Doric order, Egyptian weight with Italian lightness, Tudor strength with Elizabethan picturesqueness. It is a grievous pity that where there is so much money there is so little taste.

The sum of Fifth avenue wealth is unquestionable far beyond that of any street in the country. The dwellings cost more; the furniture and works of art are more expensive; the incomes of the inmates are larger and prodigally spent than they are anywhere else on the Continent.

The interior of the houses is often gorgeous. Nothing within money's purchase, but much that perfect taste would have suggested, seems omitted. Few of the mansions that do not reveal something like tawdriness in the excess of display. The outward eye is too much addressed. The profusion is a trifle barbaric. The subtle suggestions of complete elegance are not there.

Still, to those who have suffered from the absence of material comfort, or to those whose temperaments are voluptuous and indolent, as most poetic ones are, a feeling akin to happiness must be born of the splendid surroundings that belong to the homes of the Fifth avenue rich.

What soft velvet carpets are theirs; what handsome pictures; what rich curtains; what charming frescoes; what marbles of grace; what bronzes of beauty; what prodigality of prettiness! The soft, warm, yet fresh odor of luxury comes from every angle; fills the corridors, and the delightful chambers, where sleep seems to be hidden beneath the spotless pillows of lace, steals out of the half-open library, where hundreds of morocco volumes stand silent with the treasures of time and mind in their keeping; creeps up and down the stairways, like the breath of flowers blown by the gentle wind.

Whatever the senses could ask, or culture require, or fancy crave, might be had in the walled paradise of those splendid homes. Dishes so delicate as to tempt the most surfeited appetite; wines rich enough to woo an anchorite to their tasting; music Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Beethoven to cheer and soften, to strengthen and console; tomes of bards and sages to life the thoughts to ideal possibilities all these are to be found there. Fair harvests may be gathered every minute of the day or night; and he who takes not up the golden sickle in the fragrant field, is more to be pitied than he who sighs for flowers in a sterile waste.

Too sad for tears is the bitter fact that everything palls; that the highest and best satisfies only for a time. They who live in the midst of such splendor grow so familiar with it that they value it not. They are pared a certain number of wants, but others are felt that may not be supplied. The spirit is not satisfied with junketing; the vacuities of the heart may not be filled with shows of pleasure or the tinsel of display. It is good to be rich; but it is better to be contented.

"Remove the banquet where Sympathy will not come," says every starving soul some time in its progress, "and spread the humblest board where Love may sit." See that fair woman, robed like a queen beauty in face and form, and grace in every motion. What has she to sigh for? What can she need, with wealth, and position, and friends, and a generous heart? Nothing that she has; everything that she has not. Her generous heart, that should have been her blessing, has proved her bane. Her husband is not her love, and never was. She is wife in name merely; and to be such is to be accursed with seeming. She is married, not wedded; bound in law, though not in affection. She obeyed Fashion's dictates, and Nature exacts the penalty.

How she longs, in her splendid desolation, for the love of children that do not come for all her longing! How she thrills in sleep with the kisses of the babe that kindly dreams send to her, and presses the airy cherub to her unnursed bosom! The tender eyes open, and the happiness has gone. He sleeps heavily at her side, and she shrinks away from the dreaded touch that always wakes her like a shock. O, the woe of those whom Man has joined together, and God does not put asunder!

Tall and dignified is the handsome-looking man who sits abstracted at breakfast, over the morning paper, and whom the money-article does not even attract. His spouse seems cold, and his children distant, grouped at the oval table amid the silence of unsympathy that tells what words cannot. He has speculated, and traveled, and gratified such ambitions as most men have. But they are empty in this hour the still, introspective, conscientious hour, which none of us can wholly escape.

He remembers the landscape that he loved to look upon fifteen years before the creeping river, and the distant village, whose spires winked through the twilight; and the lithe form that slipped away from his arms until it rested on the grass, and the little head lay still in sleep upon his lap.

He remembers the coming out of the stars, and the bending down of kissing lips to the brown hair, and the walk homeward, when the milestones would not stay apart, and the struggle between the fascinations of the great city and the narrow life in the humble town, and the surrender of love to stronger lures. Alas, he left his happiness behind, and learned the truth too late!

It is with all of us as it is with him and her. We miss the way of life because human destiny is dark. We discover where our peace was when we can no longer grasp it. We ask for the beautiful vase we dashed to pieces in our petulant mood. We yearn for the impossible, and think it dearest because it is impossible.

Our hearts will not bear examination. Our experiences may not be told, for they are bitter, and teach nothing even to ourselves. Let the World spin down its grooves, and let us spin with it, and cry amen to others' prayers, and praise the shams that are put upon us every day of the year.

Come out of the houses that are not homes. Come into the street, the crowded Avenue where life overflows, and drowns disturbing thought.

What a glitter of carriages! How the well-groomed horses beat the pavement, hour after hour, all the way to the Park! Those men and those women daintily dressed, wreathed in smiles, are not like him and her we saw within those handsome walls.

Oh! no; they have no skeletons in their gilded cabinets. The festering wound is not behind those clustering gems. We none of us have woes to speak of to the many. But the stern angel who bears about the key of sympathy, unlocks velvet doors that lead to haunted chambers and to charnel vaults.

The brown-stone fronts, with all their likeness, admit very different guests. The people who live side by side in the pretentious Avenue, know each other not. Knickerbockers and parvenu, the inheritor of wealth and the architect of his own fortune, the genuine gentleman and the vulgar snob, reside in the same block.

One house is visited by the best and most distinguished; the house adjoin, by men who talk loud in suicidal syntax, and women who wear hollyhocks in their hair, and yellow dresses with pink trimmings. Here dwells an author whose works give him a large income; over the way, a fellow who has a genius for money-getting, but who cannot solve the mysteries of spelling.

Into this plain carriage steps a self-poised, low-voiced, sweet-faced woman, while, just opposite, a momentous "female" throws herself into a new landau, and orders the coachman in showy livery, to drive to "Tiffany's right straight before all them diamonds is gone."

On the sidewalk, Mrs. Merit passes quietly; and her perfect air of good-breeding is not altered by the high tones of "Mrs. Colonel Tuft hunter," who says to the bonne at the door, "Prend garde du ma infante jusque je revins."

At this the bonne, who chanced to be born in Paris instead of Dublin, looks blank, and replies in good French, which her mistress no more understands than did the maid her mistress' barbarisms.

Some of the most spacious and expensive mansions in the Avenue always have a deserted look. Only the occupants and servants appear on the high, carved stoop; only the carriages the master of the establishment owns, stop before the door.

That family purchased a house in the Avenue, but Society has not accepted its members. They have nothing but a new fortune to recommend them. They must bide their time.

The first generation of the unrecognized fares hard. The second is educated, and the third claims lineage; prates of "gentility," and frowns upon what its grandparents were. To get into the Avenue, and into its Society, are different things.

They who struggle to enter certain circles are not wanted. Those who are indifferent to mere fashion are in request; for not to seek, socially, is usually to be sought. Destiny appears willing always to grant what we do not want, and determined to withhold what we do.

Very many of these houses have histories that would furnish abundant themes for the old-fashioned, three volume English novel. Every day that passes within them would supply comedy and tragedy, one or both, if they who know would tell. One meets there, any time, women looking so pure their faces would almost contradict facts, yet part of their lives, if reveled, would repel their dearest friends. Those women are good and bad, as we understand the terms. Their faults would shock, and their virtues win us. With our foot we might spurn; with our hand we should caress.

Men we encounter in the Avenue have the angel and devil commingled in their being. They are neither so faulty nor so faultless as is believed. They are half divine, yet wholly human. They represent the World. Circumstance drives, Temperament binds them.

Fifth avenue has its shams, and follies, and evils. But go there or elsewhere, and, when we have pondered deeply enough, we shall see that Charity ends what Sympathy begins.