ld see the soul of New York, it would
look more like the Metropolitan Tower than anything else.

It seems to be trying to speak away up there in the whiteness and the
light, the very soul of the young resistless iron-hearted city.

I write as an American. To me there is something about it as I come up
the harbour that fills my heart with a big ringing, as if all the world
were ringing, ringing once more--ringing all over again--up in this
white tower of ours in its new bit of blue sky! I glory in England with
it, in Greece, in Bethlehem. It is as an outpost on Space and Time, for
all of us gathering up all history in it softly--once more and pointing
it to God!

It is the last, the youngest-minded, the most buoyant tower--the mighty
Child among the steeples of the world. The lonely towers of Cologne
stretching with that grave and empty nave against the sky, out of that
old and faded region of religion, far away, tremulously send greetings
to it--to this white tower in the west--to where it goes up with its
crowds of people in it, with business and with daily living and hoping
and dying in it, and strikes heaven!

It may be perhaps only the American blood in me. Perhaps it is raw and
new to be so happy. I do not know. I only know that to me the
Metropolitan Tower is saying something that has been never quite said
before--something that has been given in some special sense to us as a
trust from the world. It is to me the steeple of democracy--of our
democracy, England's democracy--the world's democracy. The hollow domes
of Sts. Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy
other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of
religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world--are not to me
so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower--as the
souls of these modern, heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at
last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them
up as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to
heaven!

I worship my country, my people, my city when I hear the big bell in it
and when I look up to where the tower is in that still place like a
sea--look up to where that little white country belfry sits in the
light, in the dark above the vast and roaring city!

To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out of the streets
the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that little safe,
tucked-in, t