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A CITY OF WONDER
Past the upper corner of a precipice the moon rode into view. Night
had for some while now hooded the marvelous city. They had planned it
to be symmetrical, its maps were orderly, near; in two dimensions,
that is length and breadth, its streets met and crossed each other
with regular exactitude, with all the dullness of the science of man.
The city had laughed as it were and shaken itself free and in the
third dimension had soared away to consort with all the careless,
irregular things that know not man for their master.
Yet even there, even at those altitudes, man had still clung to his
symmetry, still claimed that these mountains were houses; in orderly
rows the thousand windows stood watching each other precisely, all
orderly, all alike, lest any should guess by day that there might be
mystery here. So they stood in the daylight. The sun set, still they
were orderly, as scientific and regular as the labour of only man and
the bees. The mists darken at evening. And first the Woolworth
Building goes away, sheer home and away from any allegiance to man, to
take his place among mountains; for I saw him stand with the lower
slopes invisible in the gloaming, while only his pinnacles showed up
in the clearer sky. Thus only mountains stand.
Still all the windows of the other buildings stood in their regular
rows--all side by side in silence, not yet changed, as though waiting
one furtive moment to step from the schemes of man, to slip back to
mystery and romance again as cats do when they steal on velvet feet
away from familiar hearths in the dark of the moon.
Night fell, and the moment came. Someone lit a window, far up another
shone with its orange glow. Window by window, and yet not nearly all.
Surely if modern man with his clever schemes held any sway here still
he would have turned one switch and lit them all together; but we are
back with the older man of whom far songs tell, he whose spirit is kin
to strange romances and mountains. One by one the windows shine from
the precipices; some twinkle, some are dark; man's orderly schemes
have gone, and we are amongst vast heights lit by inscrutable beacons.
I have seen such cities before, and I have told of them in The Book
of Wonder.
Here in New York a poet met a welcome.
BEYOND THE FIELDS WE KNOW
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