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.
It is a kind of steeple of the business of this world. I would rather have said that business needed a steeple before until I saw the Metropolitan Tower and heard it singing above the streets. But I had always wanted (without knowing it), in a modern office building, a great solemn bell to remind us what the common day was. I like to hear it striking a common hour and what can be done in it. I stop in the street to listen--to listen while that great hive of people tolls--tolls not the reveries of monks above the roofs of the skyscrapers, but the religion of business--of the real and daily things, the seriousness of the mighty street and the faces of the men and the women.