faces of the interminable brick houses. He looked down in that
city as in every American town, as in these where you and I live,
on the same countless maze of human faces going day by day
through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing through
the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange
meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you
and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it
may be, you think? A commonplace crowd like this in the street
without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained,
bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize- fighters,
negroes. Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in
which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of
uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,-- where creeds,
philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their
death-struggle,-- where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers
of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred
together, struggling for victory.

Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more
tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone
before. People called him a fanatic. It may be that he was one:
yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare
not tell you of; in his own life, looked into the depths of human
loss with a mad desire to set it right. On the very faces of
those who sneered at him he found some trace of failure,
something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and
exceeding bitter cry. The voice of the world, he thought, went
up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great
blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no
help?