nd nobody knew.

And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the
great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the
more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private
parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little
absent, now and then a footfall passing through.

And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we
going?"

And nobody knew.

It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all
about me, out of the skyscrapers.

New York did not know.

Now London did not know.

* * * * *

And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of
books.

I could not but look about--how could I do otherwise than look about?--a
lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways
and windows--for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in
the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who
still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint
and tiny roar of London.

I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the
men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they
mould their thoughts.

I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to you out of his
long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it?... Here, where Shakespeare
played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton,
Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives
and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets,
going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb
walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made
one--lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men....

I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John Galsworthy
out with his camera--his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett
stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day--big, curious
tapestries of little things; H.G. Wells, with his retorts, his
experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew
of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer
messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K.
Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting,
rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and
Bernard Shaw