tificial stars may seem to fill the
heavens, and the real stars to have faded from sight. But I am content
for the moment to reaffirm the merely imaginative pleasure of those
dizzy turrets and dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were
really all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The fact that
they were really built for something need not unduly depress us for a
moment, or drag down our soaring fancies. There is something about these
vertical lines that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great
cataracts topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I should
rather speak of rockets. There is only something underneath the mind
murmuring that nothing remains at last of a flaming rocket except a
falling stick. I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words
written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger that wrote on
Belshazzar's wall.... But what did it write on Belshazzar's wall?... I
am content once more to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark
sympathy with those many-coloured solar systems turning so dizzily, far
up in the divine vacuum of the night.

'From the earth we come and to the earth we return; when people get away
from that they are lost.'

_Irish and other Interviewers_

It is often asked what should be the first thing that a man sees when he
lands in a foreign country; but I think it should be the vision of his
own country. At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of grey
and green cloud came between me and the towers with multitudinous
windows, white in the winter sunlight; and I saw an old brown house
standing back among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one among
many friends and neighbours, but one somehow so sunken in the very heart
of England as to be unconscious of her imperial or international
position, and out of the sound of her perilous seas. But what made most
clear the vision that revisited me was something else. Before we touched
land the men of my own guild, the journalists and reporters, had already
boarded the ship like pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent
that I knew; and thanked me for all I had done for Ireland. And it was
at that moment that I knew most vividly that what I wanted was to do
something for England.

Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of Liberty, and saw
that the great bronze was gleaming green in the morning light. I had
made all the obvious jokes about the statue of Li