cathedral civilization and thrones and popes in it, we are bound to say in some stupendous fashion of our own—­something which, when it is built at last, will be left worshipping upon the ground beneath the sky when we are dead, as a memorial that we too have lived.  The great cathedrals, with the feet of the huddled and dreary poor upon their floors, and saints and heroes shining on their pillars, and priests behind the chancel with God to themselves, and the vast and vacant nave, symbol of the heaven glimmering above that few could reach—­it is not to these that we shall look to get ourselves said to the nations that are now unborn; rather, though it be strange to say it, we shall look to something like the ocean steamship—­cathedral of this huge unresting modern world—­under the wide heaven, on the infinite seas, with spars for towers and the empty nave reversed filled with human beings’ souls—­the cathedral of crowds hurrying to crowds.  There are hundreds of them throbbing and gleaming in the night—­this very moment—­lonely cities in the hollow of the stars, bringing together the nations of the earth.

When the spirit of our modern way of living, the idea in it, the bare facts about our modern human nature have been noticed at last by our modern artists, masterpieces shall come to us out of every great and living activity in our lives.  Art shall tell the things these lives are about.  When this is once realized in America as it was in Greece, the fine arts shall cover the other arts as the waters cover the sea.  The Brooklyn Bridge, swinging its web for immortal souls across sky and sea, comes nearer to being a work of art than almost anything we possess to-day, because it tells the truth, because it is the material form of a spiritual idea, because it is a sublime and beautiful expression of New York in the way that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful expression of Athens.  The Acropolis was beautiful because it was the abode of heroes, of great individuals; and the Brooklyn Bridge, because it expresses the bringing together of millions of men.  It is the architecture of crowds—­this Brooklyn Bridge—­with winds and sunsets and the dark and the tides of souls upon it; it is the type and symbol of the kind of thing that our modern genius is bound to make beautiful and immortal before it dies.  The very word “bridge” is the symbol of the future of art and of everything else, the bringing together of things that are apart—­democracy.  The bridge, which makes land across the water, and the boat, which makes land on the water, and the cable, which makes land and water alike—­these are the physical forms of the spirit of modern life, the democracy of matter.  But the spirit has countless forms.  They are all new and they are all waiting to be made beautiful.  The dumb crowd waits in them.  We have electricity—­the life current of the republican idea—­characteristically our foremost invention, because it takes all power that belongs to individual places and puts it on a