In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the sky-scraper.  At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers illuminated from within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiously beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world.  The early night effect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan tower, seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles some enchanted city of the next world rather than of this.  And the fact that a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation of a frothing glass of beer inconceivably large—­well, this fact too has its importance.

But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that which disengages itself from them externally.  You must enter them in order to appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal.  Outside, they often have the air of being nothing in particular; at best the facade is far too modest in its revelation of the interior.  You can quite easily walk by a sky-scraper on Broadway without noticing it.  But you cannot actually go into the least of them and not be impressed.  You are in a palace.  You are among marbles and porphyries.  You breathe easily in vast and brilliant foyers that never see daylight.  And then you come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with which the building and every other building in New York is secretly honeycombed, and the palisade is opened and an elevator snatches you up.  I think of American cities as enormous agglomerations in whose inmost dark recesses innumerable elevators are constantly ascending and descending, like the angels of the ladder....

[Illustration:  THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT]

The elevator ejects you.  You are taken into dazzling daylight, into what is modestly called a business office; but it resembles in its grandeur no European business office, save such as may have been built by an American.  You look forth from a window, and lo!  New York and the Hudson are beneath you, and you are in the skies.  And in the warmed stillness of the room you hear the wind raging and whistling, as you would have imagined it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a three-master at sea.  There are, however, a dozen more stories above this story.  You walk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry learn that the rent of this one suite-among so many-is over thirty-six thousand dollars a year!  And you reflect that, to the beholder in the street, all that is represented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a diminishing chess-board of windows.  And you begin to realize what a sky-scraper is, and the poetry of it.