ry description. Modern rationalistic
critics, with characteristic consistency, had blamed it for its
accumulated rubbish and its modern restoration, for its antiquated
superstition and its up-to-date vulgarity. But somehow the one
impression that had never pierced through their description was the
simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with walls coming to
the very edge of slopes that were almost as steep as walls; the turreted
city which crowns a cone-shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes.
One would suppose that this was at once the plainest and most
picturesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, I had always
lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were merely details. We know
that a city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; and yet it would seem
that it is exactly the hill that is hid; though perhaps it is only hid
from the wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simple
impression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid the phrase; for it
would really seem that each man discovers it for himself.

Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them, about the tall and
dominant buildings of New York. I agree that they have an instant effect
on the imagination; which I think is increased by the situation in which
they stand, and out of which they arose. They are all the more
impressive because the building, while it is vertically so vast, is
horizontally almost narrow. New York is an island, and has all the
intensive romance of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height
upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a lofty lighthouse upon
a lonely rock. But this story of the sky-scrapers, which I had often
heard, would by itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest
and most curious characteristic of American architecture. Told only in
terms of these great towers of stone and brick in the big industrial
cities, the story would tend too much to an impression of something cold
and colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would suggest a modern
Babylon altogether too Babylonian. It would imply that a man of the new
world was a sort of new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a
pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of
mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine
school of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of all
sky-scrapers--the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the less because
there is