If one could see a soul—­if one could see the soul of New York, it would look more like the Metropolitan Tower than anything else.

It seems to be trying to speak away up there in the whiteness and the light, the very soul of the young resistless iron-hearted city.

I write as an American.  To me there is something about it as I come up the harbour that fills my heart with a big ringing, as if all the world were ringing, ringing once more—­ringing all over again—­up in this white tower of ours in its new bit of blue sky!  I glory in England with it, in Greece, in Bethlehem.  It is as an outpost on Space and Time, for all of us gathering up all history in it softly—­once more and pointing it to God!

It is the last, the youngest-minded, the most buoyant tower—­the mighty Child among the steeples of the world.  The lonely towers of Cologne stretching with that grave and empty nave against the sky, out of that old and faded region of religion, far away, tremulously send greetings to it—­to this white tower in the west—­to where it goes up with its crowds of people in it, with business and with daily living and hoping and dying in it, and strikes heaven!

It may be perhaps only the American blood in me.  Perhaps it is raw and new to be so happy.  I do not know.  I only know that to me the Metropolitan Tower is saying something that has been never quite said before—­something that has been given in some special sense to us as a trust from the world.  It is to me the steeple of democracy—­of our democracy, England’s democracy—­the world’s democracy.  The hollow domes of Sts.  Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world—­are not to me so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower—­as the souls of these modern, heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them up as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to heaven!

I worship my country, my people, my city when I hear the big bell in it and when I look up to where the tower is in that still place like a sea—­look up to where that little white country belfry sits in the light, in the dark above the vast and roaring city!

To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out of the streets the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that little safe, tucked-in, trim, Sunday religion of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty signs and portents of our time.  Have I not heard the bell tolling to the people in the midst of business and singing great hymns?  A great city lifts itself and prays in it—­prays while it sings and clangs so absent-looking below.

I like to go out before going to sleep and take a look at it—­one more look before I sleep, upon the tower, strong, unyielding, alive, sinewy, imperturbable, lifting up within itself the steel and soul of the world.  I am content to go to sleep.