the
emigrants in the steerage, there was a tinkling music as I prayed and a
man's voice singing a plaintive air in some strange Slavonic tongue.

That voice of the invisible singer and the spirit of the unknown
song-maker and the serenity of the sky, they were all, I perceived, no
more and no less than things in myself that I did not understand. They
were out beyond the range of understanding. And yet they fell into the
completest harmony that night with all that I seemed to understand....

Sec. 8

The onset of New York was extraordinarily stimulating to me. I write
onset. It is indeed that. New York rides up out of the waters, a cliff
of man's making; its great buildings at a distance seem like long
Chinese banners held up against the sky. From Sandy Hook to the great
landing stages and the swirling hooting traffic of the Hudson River
there fails nothing in that magnificent crescendo of approach.

And New York keeps the promise of its first appearance. There is no
such fulness of life elsewhere in all the world. The common man in the
streets is a bigger common man than any Old World city can show,
physically bigger; there is hope in his eyes and a braced defiance. New
York may be harsh and blusterous and violent, but there is a breeze from
the sea and a breeze of fraternity in the streets, and the Americans of
all peoples in the world are a nation of still unbroken men.

I went to America curious, balancing between hope and scepticism. The
European world is full of the criticism of America, and for the matter
of that America too is full of it; hostility and depreciation
prevail,--overmuch, for in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of
blatant, oh! quite asinine folly, the United States of America remains
the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is
the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most
valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.

Here was the antithesis of India; here were no peasants whatever, no
traditional culture, no castes, no established differences (except for
the one schism of color); this amazing place had never had a famine,
never a plague; here were no temples and no priesthoods dominating the
lives of the people,--old Trinity church embedded amidst towering
sky-scrapers was a symbol for as much as they had of all that; and here
too there was no crown, no affectations of an ancient loyalty, no
visible army, no traditions of