God
together--Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines.

With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still locomotives
in the din whispering across the street; with the wide black crowd
streaming up and streaming down, and the big, faraway, other-worldly
church above, I am strangely glad. It is like having a picture of one's
whole world taken up deftly, and done in miniature and hung up for one
against the sky--the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the
vast hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward heaven
day and night for us all....

I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in Clifford's Inn and
stealing a glimpse and coming back to my fireplace. I sit still a moment
before going to work and look in the flames and think. The great roar
outside the Court gathers it all up--that huge, boundless, tiny,
summed-up world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows
while I sit and think.

And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully,
half-triumphantly back to one's work--the very thought of it. The Crowd
hurrying, the Crowd's flurrying Machines, and the Crowd's God, send one
back to one's work!

In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the crowds along
the Strand, toward Charing Cross.

I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming taxis, all
these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women, when a little
space of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like globules, like
mercury, between the cabs.

But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story of the
street, coming in over one like waves, like seas--all these happy,
curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people on benches;
these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and Americans--all these
little scurrying congregations, hundreds of them, rolling past.

I sit on the front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow with the driver,
staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks--that low,
distant space where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so
gone-by below.

The street is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it, or roll
or swing on top of a 'bus through it--the miles of faces, all these
tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all
sides of you, and in the windows and along the walks, the things they
wear, and the things they eat, and the things they pour down their
little throats,