Crowds

Excerpt: 'The best picture I know of my religion is Ludgate Hill as one sees it going down the foot of Fleet Street. It would seem to many perhaps like a rather strange half-heathen altar, but it has in it the three things with which I worship most my Maker in this present world-the three things which it would be the breath of religion to me to offer to a God together-Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines. With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still locomotives in the din whispering across the street; with the wide black crowd streaming up and streaming down, and the big, faraway, other-worldly church above, I am strangely glad. It is like having a picture of one's whole world taken up deftly, and done in miniature and hung up for one against the sky-the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the vast hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward heaven day and night for us all.... I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in Clifford's Inn and stealing a glimpse and coming back to my fireplace. I sit still a moment before going to work and look in the flames and think. The great roar outside the Court gathers it all up-that huge, boundless, tiny, summed-up world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows while I sit and think. And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully, half-triumphantly back to one's work-the very thought of it. The Crowd hurrying, the Crowd's flurrying Machines, and the Crowd's God, send one back to one's work! In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the crowds along the Strand, toward Charing Cross. I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming taxis, all these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women, when a little space of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like globules, like mercury, between the cabs. But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story of the street, coming in over one like waves, like seas-all these happy, curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people on benches; these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and Americans-all these little scurrying congregations, hundreds of them, rolling past.'