So it was with a fairly blank mind, and yet a hope of understanding, or
at least of seeing, something very remarkably fresh, that I woke to hear
we were in harbour, and tumbled out on deck at six of a fine summer
morning to view a new world. New York Harbour is loveliest at night
perhaps. On the Staten Island ferry boat you slip out from the darkness
right under the immense sky-scrapers. As they recede they form into a
mass together, heaping up one behind another, fire-lined and majestic,
sentinel over the black, gold-streaked waters. Their cliff-like boldness
is the greater, because to either side sweep in the East River and the
Hudson River, leaving this piled promontory between. To the right hangs
the great stretch of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge, its slight curve
very purely outlined with light; over it luminous trams, like shuttles
of fire, are thrown across and across, continually weaving the stuff of
human existence. From further off all these lights dwindle to a radiant
semicircle that gazes out over the expanse with a quiet, mysterious
expectancy. Far away seaward you may see the low golden glare of Coney
Island.

But there was beauty in the view that morning, also, half an hour after
sunrise. New York, always the cleanest and least smoky of cities, lay
asleep in a queer, pearly, hourless light. A thin mist softened the
further outlines. The water was opalescent under a silver sky, cool and
dim, very slightly ruffled by the sweet wind that followed us in from
the sea. A few streamers of smoke flew above the city, oblique and
parallel, pennants of our civilisation. The space of water is great, and
so the vast buildings do not tower above one as they do from the street.
Scale is lost, and they might be any size. The impression is, rather, of
long, low buildings stretching down to the water's edge on every side,
and innumerable low black wharves and jetties and piers. And at one