king
softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the
word that was given to me to say.

Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful,
clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the
other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and
actions great in the world?

Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great
gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are
unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting
together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first
world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really
getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished,
lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One
sees the sign on it

TO LET
TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.

VIII

THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP

"_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me
Of some transcendent music I have heard;
No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,
No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.
But a glad strain of some still symphony
That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._"

Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle
Reader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying
there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as
you stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in
your being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people
in it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls
say it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in
the street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls,
that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O to
know--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second,
twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to
be sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets
and silent houses of it!"

I go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nights
of the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, in
The Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And I
have said to you though I did not know it: "Did you not call to me?
Did you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you."

I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my so