And I found them all full of the same strange questioning:  “Where are we going?”

And nobody knew.

It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all about me, out of the skyscrapers.

New York did not know.

Now London did not know.

* * * * *

And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of books.

I could not but look about—­how could I do otherwise than look about?—­a lonely American walking at last past all these nobly haunted doorways and windows—­for your idealists or interpreters, your men who bring in the sea upon your streets and the mountains on your roof-tops; who still see the wide, still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint and tiny roar of London.

I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets; for the men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of nations because they mould their thoughts.

I do not like to say it.  How shall an American, coming to you out of his long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it?...  Here, where Shakespeare played mightily, and like a great boy with the world; where Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives and refreshed the hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets, going past these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even made one—­lifted over his London forever into the hearts of men....

I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days:  John Galsworthy out with his camera—­his beautiful, sad, foggy camera; Arnold Bennett stitching and stitching faithfully twenty-four hours a day—­big, curious tapestries of little things; H.G.  Wells, with his retorts, his experiments about him, his pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew of steam, half-hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer messes of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G.K.  Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contradicting, rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His Own Mind; and Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by), the eternal boy, on the eternal curbstone of the world, threw stones; and the Bishop of Birmingham preached a fine, helpless sermon....

* * * * *

When a new American, coming from his own big, hurried, formless, speechless country, finds himself in what he had always supposed to be this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate England, and when, thrust up out of the ground in Trafalgar Square, he finds himself looking at that vast yellow mist of people, that vast bewilderment of faces, of the poor, of the rich, coming and going they cannot say where—­he naturally thinks at first it must be because they cannot speak; and when he looks to those who speak for them, to their writers or interpreters, and when he finds that