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The Metropolitan tower in Madison Square is less intimate. It has its moods, but they are the moods of the mountain. It has dwarfed the graceful, Spanish tower of the Madison Square Garden, without a doubt, and taken the proud Diana down a peg. But there are compensations in its mightiness. Have you ever seen it on a foggy day going up out of sight into the driving vapors? Have you stood in ancient Gramercy Park–still a bit of the old, domestic New York of the ’70’s–and seen it booming up over the red brick dwellings, white and confident into the sun? Have you ever come down through Madison Square late at night, when the relic of a moon was rising behind the tower, and the ghostly shaft stood up tremendous against the pale, racing cloud-rack? Have you seen it with the last pink glow of sunset upon it, and upon the western wall of the Flatiron Building, and upon nothing else, all lower buildings being in shadows of obscuring twilight? That is one of its delicate mountain moods, when it seems to lift above our earth-bound vision and look over those western cloud ranges into the Land Beyond the Sunset.

Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. They are lost in the gloom of coming night. But still they must go on, for far aloft you see the lantern glowing like a star, hung between earth and heaven. In this twilight hour of blue and gold the tower is the mighty guardian spirit of the scene, sending down sonorous word of the hours as they pass, and lifting our eyes, like its steady lantern, toward the watch-towers of Eternity. Must we be forever reminded that those glowing window squares up its flanks denote lawyers toiling late at their briefs, or mining stock promoters planning a new cast of the net? Must we be forever told that this is not a spire in praise of God but a monument in praise of Mammon? Aspiration is in its lines, beauty in its sky-borne shaft of blue and gold, wonder in its shrouded summit.

“They builded better than they knew–
The conscious stone to beauty grew.”

It is enough. Let us wonder and be glad.

There are many odd views of the tower to be had for a little searching, spots where its peak appears in unexpected places, or with unusual suggestion. There is just one point in Union Square, for example, about halfway round “dead man’s curve,” where you see the tapering pyramid and the golden lantern overtopping the high buildings between. You do not see it again, if you are walking up Broadway, till you are close to Madison Square. Then, if you lift your eyes, you are suddenly aware of it looming far aloft over the cornice-line to your right, shredding the mists on a stormy day, or by night lifting its lantern up with the stars. There is always an added impressiveness about a tower when we cannot see the base. The sheer drop of its sides is left to our imagination, and the human imagination may generally be trusted to embroider fact. For that reason alone, the view of the tower from a certain point on East Thirty-first Street, between Madison and Fourth Avenues, would be worth the searching out. But it has another and unique charm. If you will walk along Thirtieth Street toward Fourth Avenue you will see, tucked in between larger and more modern buildings on the south side, a little two-story-and-a-half wooden cottage, set back a few feet behind an iron fence. It must have stood there many years, for the wooden age in New York was long, long ago. It is a quaint little dwelling, with quaint pseudo-Gothic ornamentations, and until recently was used as an antique shop. A large weather-stained Venus stood upon the front porch, ironically beside a spinning-wheel! Now the house is untenanted, so that you lift your eyes the sooner to look above and beyond it. It occupies, of course, a slit between higher buildings. Through that slit, as you stand on the opposite curb, you look over a few spindly black chimney-stacks in the foreground directly to the Metropolitan Tower, booming up suddenly and unexpectedly. You see only that for a moment, because of its Titanic size and white impressiveness. Then you notice something outlined against it, a lower tower, much more slender, a mere tracery of delicate shafts and belfries, and crowning it, her bow forever poised, the lovely limbed Diana. Whence either of these towers come, you see not. They merely spring up into the vision over the roof of the little wooden house, the darker one outlined against the other for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords–forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, St. Gaudens’ bronze Diana.