Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, ed. The Book of New York Verse. 1917.

New York

Florence Earle Coates

DOWN-GAZING, I behold,

Miraculous by night,

A city all of gold.

Here, there, and everywhere,

In myriad fashion fair,

A mystery untold

Of Light!

Not royal Babylon,

Nor Tyre, nor Rome the great—

In the all-powerful state

Her wisdom and her armèd legions won—

Was so illuminate

As the strange world which, awed, I look upon.

With it compared, the ancient glories fail,

And, in the glow it doth irradiate,

The planets of the firmament grow pale!

Night, birth-fellow to Chaos, never wore

A robe so gemmed before.

The splendour streams

In lines and jets and scintillating gleams

From tower and spire and campanile bright,

And palaces of light.

How beautiful is this

Unmatched Cosmopolis!—

City of wealth and want,

Of pitiless extremes,

Selfish ambitions, pure aspiring dreams;

Whose miseries, remembered, daunt

The bravest spirit hope hath cheered—

This city loved and hated, honoured, feared:

This Titan City, bold to dare:

This wounded Might

That, dreading darkness, still conceals its care

And hides its gaping hurt ’neath veils of light!

Oh, I have looked on Venice when the moon

Silvered each dark lagoon,

And have in dreams beheld her

Clothed in resplendent pride,

The Adriatic’s bride!

Naples I, too, have seen—

An even lovelier Queen—

And thought that nothing in the world excelled her—

Nay marvelled, as at close of day

I gazed across her opalescent bay

And saw Vesuvius burn on high

Against the soft Italian sky,

That anything on earth could wear

A charm so past compare!

Yet, O Manhattan! Glowing now

Against the sombre night,

Thine opulence and squalor hid from sight,

Never was aught more beautiful than thou

Dost in thy calm appear—

So glorified and so transfigured here—

Since the Eternal, to creation stirred,

Breathed from His awful lips the mystic word:

Let there be Light!