ty nave reversed filled with human beings'
souls--the cathedral of crowds hurrying to crowds. There are hundreds of
them throbbing and gleaming in the night--this very moment--lonely
cities in the hollow of the stars, bringing together the nations of the
earth.

When the spirit of our modern way of living, the idea in it, the bare
facts about our modern human nature have been noticed at last by our
modern artists, masterpieces shall come to us out of every great and
living activity in our lives. Art shall tell the things these lives are
about. When this is once realized in America as it was in Greece, the
fine arts shall cover the other arts as the waters cover the sea. The
Brooklyn Bridge, swinging its web for immortal souls across sky and sea,
comes nearer to being a work of art than almost anything we possess
to-day, because it tells the truth, because it is the material form of a
spiritual idea, because it is a sublime and beautiful expression of New
York in the way that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful
expression of Athens. The Acropolis was beautiful because it was the
abode of heroes, of great individuals; and the Brooklyn Bridge, because
it expresses the bringing together of millions of men. It is the
architecture of crowds--this Brooklyn Bridge--with winds and sunsets and
the dark and the tides of souls upon it; it is the type and symbol of
the kind of thing that our modern genius is bound to make beautiful and
immortal before it dies. The very word "bridge" is the symbol of the
future of art and of everything else, the bringing together of things
that are apart--democracy. The bridge, which makes land across the
water, and the boat, which makes land on the water, and the cable, which
makes land and water alike--these are the physical forms of the spirit
of modern life, the democracy of matter. But the spirit has countless
forms. They are all new and they are all waiting to be made beautiful.
The dumb crowd waits in them. We have electricity--the life current of
the republican idea--characteristically our foremost invention, because
it takes all power that belongs to individual places and puts it on a
wire and carries it to all places. We have the telephone, an invention
which makes it possible for a man to live on a back street and be a
next-door neighbour to boulevards; and we have the trolley, the modern
reduction of the private carriage to its lowest terms, so that any man
for five cents can have a