If the Americans had felt they would have found a
good superb New York. It is true Ages and of the Renaissance their soaring brethren of New able to attend the Conference deal to remind them of their own that the architects of the Middle did not dare to build as high as York. They never even dreamed of houses 1,000 feet high. But their problem was the same, and according to their mechanical powers they faced it in the same way. Yet in truth the two cities, though they have a certain essential resemblance, are more marked by contrasts than by similarities. The Latin spirit has been true to itself in Genoa, and it is at once beautiful and exact, smiling and regular. A true product of the North, New York shows a Nordic heart. It faces the world with an expression aloof and almost terrible in the magnificence of the imagination that has raised and crowned its mountains of stone—a towered city if ever there was one. But it shows, also, that dark and true and even tender is the North. The place destined to be not only the greatest of all cities as well as the greatest in which the English language is spoken and English ideals and English culture followed, is far subtler, far more full of a turbulent mystery, than Genoa is, or ever has been or can be. There is a touch of tragedy in the American city in spite of her splendour and her strength. She is the lady of the ocean, seated amid her innumerable ships and her incalculable wealth. The sounds and winds of the sea are in her streets, and for all her apparent hardness and glitter and crude efficiency she has caught some- thing of the tumult, the sternness, and the melancholy of Atlantic waves.
