And at first disappointed with shoddy/the bare ramshackle quais, but then saw the/high buggy wheels/and was reconciled,/ George Santayana arriving in the port of Boston

George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-born American philosopher.

Here by chance my eye, at the first moment of my setting foot in the new world, was caught by symbols of Yankee ingenuity and Yankee haste which I couldn't in the least understand but which instinctively pleased and displeased me. I was fascinated by the play of the skeleton wheels, crossing one another like whirling fans in the air, and I was disgusted by such a dirty ramshackle pier for a great steamship line. I think now that the two things expressed the same mentality. The pier served its immediate purpose, for there we were landing safely at it; it hadn't required any great outlay of capital; and what did it matter if it was ugly and couldn't last long? It might last long enough to pay, and enable the company to build a better one. As for the buggy, its extreme lightness economized force and made speed possible over sandy and ill-kept roads.

--Santayana, George, Persons and Places, Fragments of an Autobiography, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1956, pg 130.