s.
To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the
young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the
threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude
every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or
Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and
fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman and apparently sinister
powers. Cycling round the boulevards of a sunny morning, you rejoice in
the airy and spacious greenery of the Garden City. Driving along the
Lake Shore to Lincoln Park in the flush of sunset, you wonder that the
dwellers in this street of palaces should trouble their heads about
Naples or Venice, when they have before their very windows the
innumerable laughter, the ever-shifting opalescence, of their
fascinating inland sea. Plunging in the electric cars through the river
subway, and emerging in the West Side, you realise that the slums of
Chicago, if not quite so tightly packed as those of New York or London,
are no whit behind them in the other essentials of civilised barbarism.
Chicago, more than any other city of my acquaintance, suggests that
antique conception of the underworld which placed Elysium and Tartarus
not only on the same plane, but, so to speak, round the corner from each
other.

As the elephant (or rather the megatherium) to the giraffe, so is the
colossal business block of Chicago to the sky-scraper of New York. There
is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth buildings of Chicago which is
lacking in most of those which form the jagged sky-line of Manhattan
Island. For one reason or another--no doubt some difference in the
system of land tenure is at the root of the matter--the Chicago
architect has usually a larger plot of ground to operate on than his New
York colleague, and can consequently give his building breadth and depth
as well as height. Before the lanky giants of the Eastern metropolis,
one has generally to hold one's aesthetic judgment in abeyance. They are
not precisely ugly, but still less, as a rule, can they be called
beautiful. They are simply astounding manifestations of human energy and
heaven-storming audacity. They stand outside the pale of aesthetics, like
the Eiffel Tower or the Forth Bridge. But in Chicago proportion goes
along with mere height, and many of the business houses are, if not
beautiful, at least aesthetically impressive--for instance, the grim
fortali