the massed sky-scrapers illuminated
from within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiously
beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early night
effect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan tower,
seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles some
enchanted city of the next world rather than of this. And the fact that
a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation of a
frothing glass of beer inconceivably large--well, this fact too has its
importance.

But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that which
disengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in order to
appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal.
Outside, they often have the air of being nothing in particular; at best
the facade is far too modest in its revelation of the interior. You can
quite easily walk by a sky-scraper on Broadway without noticing it. But
you cannot actually go into the least of them and not be impressed. You
are in a palace. You are among marbles and porphyries. You breathe
easily in vast and brilliant foyers that never see daylight. And then
you come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with which the building
and every other building in New York is secretly honeycombed, and the
palisade is opened and an elevator snatches you up. I think of American
cities as enormous agglomerations in whose inmost dark recesses
innumerable elevators are constantly ascending and descending, like the
angels of the ladder....

[Illustration: THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT]

The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling daylight, into what
is modestly called a business office; but it resembles in its grandeur
no European business office, save such as may have been built by an
American. You look forth from a window, and lo! New York and the Hudson
are beneath you, and you are in the skies. And in the warmed stillness
of the room you hear the wind raging and whistling, as you would have
imagined it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a three-master
at sea. There are, however, a dozen more stories above this story. You
walk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry learn that the
rent of this one suite-among so many-is over thirty-six thousand dollars
a year! And you reflect that, to the beholder in the street, all that is
represented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a diminishi