"Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one to every other block. There is that supreme sky-scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the Flatiron, since the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with men's umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and 'tempestuous petticoats' of the women, has sunk back into a measurable inconspicuity, so all the other tall buildings have somehow harmonized themselves with the prospect and no longer form the barbarous architectural chaos of lower New York. I don't object to their being mainly business houses and hotels; I think that it is much more respectable than being palaces or war-like eminences, Guelf or Ghibelline; and as I ride up-town in my motor-bus, I thrill with their grandeur and glow with their condescension. Yes, they condescend; and although their tall white flanks climb in the distance, they seem to sink on nearer approach, and amiably decline to disfigure the line of progress, or to dwarf the adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the heart of New York, poor old Trinity looks driven into the ground by the surrounding heights and bulks; but along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently. But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates folded back from them." "Come!" we said. "This is beginning to be something like." "In November," our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of praise, "there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you mounted to your place on top, about three o'clock, you looked up or down the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical lines of Keats: 'His soul shall know the sadness of her night, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'" We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. "Explain, O Howadji!"