New England--shrank to littleness. First there was all
about her the sway of the East River, golden--flecked with the morning
sun, which glowed through a thin haze. From either shore a city climbed,
topped with steeples and mill chimneys--floods of tenements and homes.
Then the boat swept under the enormous steel bridges which seemed upheld
by some invisible power and throbbed with life above them. And then,
finally, came the Vision of the City. The wide expanse of rolling,
slapping water was busy with innumerable harbor craft, crowded ferries,
puffing tugs, each wafting its plume of smoke and white steam; but from
those waters rose tier after tier of square-set skyscrapers climbing in
an irregular hill to the thin peak of the highest tower. In the golden
haze, shot with sun, the whole block of towers loomed distant, gigantic,
shadowy, unreal--a magic city floating on the waters of the morning.
Windows flashed, spirals of white smoke spun thin from the far roofs.
Myra thought of those skyscrapers as the big brothers of the island
gazing out over the Atlantic.

The boat rounded the tip of the island, furrowing the broad surface of
the bay, which seemed as the floor of a stage before that lifting huge
sky-lost amphitheater. Every advance changed the many-faceted beauty of
New York, and Myra, gazing, had one glimpse across little green Battery
Park up the deep twilit canon of Broadway, the city's spine. The young
woman was moved to tears. She seemed to slough off at that moment the
church of her youth, averring that New York was too big for a creed. It
was the great human outworking; the organism of the mighty many. It
seemed a miracle that all this splendor and wonder had been wrought by
human hands. Surely human nature was great--greater than she had
dreamed. If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more
than she had dared to imagine, "deeper than ever plummet had sounded."
She felt new courage, new faith. She wanted to leave the boat and merge
with those buildings and those swarming streets. She was proud of the
great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers
that ruled this immensity.

But beyond all she felt the city's _livingness_. The air seemed charged
with human activity, with toil-pulsations. She was all crowded about
with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed
_crowd-touch_. Here, surely, was life--life thick, happy, busy, daring,
ideal. Here was pioneer