ficiency as they see their special interests and tasks
converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this
not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration
from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may
aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike.

Our modern town is thus in a very real sense, one not hopeless, but as
hopeful as may be, a veritable purgatory; that is a struggle of lower
and higher idealisms, amid the respective expressions and outcomes of
these. Indeed, in our own present [Page: 97] cities, as they have come
to be, is not each of us ever finding his own Inferno, or it may be his
Paradise? Does he not see the dark fate of some, the striving and rising
hope of others, the redemption also?

The supreme poetic utterance of the mediaeval world is thus in great
measure, as each thoughtful reader sees, an expression of impassioned
citizenship and this at one of the golden moments of the long history of
city life. This expression--this exiled citizen's autobiographic
thought-stream--is resumed at every level, from youthful home and local
colour, from boyish love and hopes, from active citizenship and party
struggle, to the transfiguration of all these. Hence these mystic
visions, and these world ambitions, temporal and spiritual; hence this
rise from cloistered faith and philosophy into many-sided culture; hence
the transformation of all these through intensest symbol-visions into
enduring song.

Am I thus suggesting the _Divina Comedia_ as a guide-book to cities?
Without doubt, though not necessarily for beginners. Yet who can see
Florence without this, though we may pack below it Baedeker and Murray?
Or who, that can really read, can open a volume of Mr. Booth's severely
statistical Survey of London, with all its studious reserve, its
scientific repression, without seeing between its lines the Dantean
circles; happy if he can sometimes read them upward as well as down?

O--A CIVIC SYMBOL AND ITS MEANING

But such books of the city, whether of the new and observant type, from
Baedeker to Booth, or of the old and interpretative Dantean one, are too
vast and varied to keep open before us. Even the preceding open page of
diagram is complex enough with its twofold, indeed four-fold city; and
we are called back to our daily work in the first of these divisions,
that of the everyday town. Since its subjective aspects of school