ts belfry windows, while the tower
itself was a black silhouette against the sky, and down in the shadowy
Square the night lamps began to come out, or the asphalt, drenched by
a shower, shone as if molten copper had been rained upon it! In how
many deep, starlit nights have I thrown open my window for a fresher
breath and a moment of meditation, to see the deserted Square below
me, its white arch faintly gleaming in the radiation of the arc lamps,
the long stretch of city roofs beyond, the twinkling lamps on the far
heights of Hoboken, and there in the centre of the picture the dark,
silent tower, keeping quiet watch and bearing its steady cross like a
star-cluster in the night! Many a time I have gone to bed with its
beautiful image behind my eyelids.

The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has its
moods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the
graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt,
and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations in
its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out of
sight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy
Park--still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the '70's--and seen
it booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident into
the sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night,
when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostly
shaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Have
you seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon the
western wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, all
lower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one
of its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above our
earth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into the
Land Beyond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight
hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps
have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past
you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of
twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The
tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great
clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way
up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a
spot of gold, and taper i