beneath the weight of the mountains which they support, look
like dens of a primitive race, continually receiving and
pouring forth a stream of people. You lift your eyes, and you
feel that up there behind the perpendicular wall, with
its innumerable windows, is a multitude coming and
going,--crowding the offices that perforate these cliffs of
brick and iron, dizzied with the speed of the elevators.
You divine, you feel the hot breath of speculation quivering
behind these windows. This it is which has fecundated these
thousands of square feet of earth, in order that from them may
spring up this appalling growth of business palaces, that hide
the sun from you and almost shut out the light of day.

"The simple power of necessity is to a certain degree a principle of
beauty," says M. Bourget, and to these structures this order of beauty
cannot be denied, but even this is vitiated by a failure to press the
advantage home: the ornate façades are notably less impressive
than those whose grim and stark geometry is unmitigated by the
grave-clothes of dead styles. Instances there are of strivings toward
a beauty that is fresh and living, but they are so unsuccessful and
infrequent as to be negligible. However impressive these buildings may
be by reason of their ordered geometry, their weight and magnitude,
and as a manifestation of irrepressible power, they have the
unloveliness of things ignoble being the product neither of praise,
nor joy, nor worship, but enclosures for the transaction of sharp
bargains--gold bringing jinn of our modern Aladdins, who love them not
but only use them. That is the reason they are ugly; no one has loved
them for themselves alone.

For beauty is ever the very face of love. From the architecture of