Rupert Brooke

“ After that, the lights come out up-town, and the New York of theatres and vaudevilles and restaurants begins to roar and flare. The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue. ”

“ That enigmatic obscuration of light, that answer that is no answer, is, perhaps, the first thing in this world that a child born near here will see, and the last that a dying man will have to take for a message to the curious dead. ”

“ These American commercial travellers are called 'drummers'; drummers in the most endless and pointless and extraordinary of wars. They have the air and appearance of devotees, men set aside, roaming preachers of a jehad whose meaning they have forgotten. They seem to be invariably of the short, dark type. The larger, fair-haired, long-headed men are common in business, but not in 'drumming.' The drummer's eyes have a hard, rapt expression. ”

“ She is older than the sky-scrapers amongst which she sits; and one, certainly, of her eyelids is a trifle weary. And the only answer to our cries, the only comment upon our cities, is that divine stare, the wink, once, twice, thrice. ”

“ And close by this message come forth a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, box a short round, vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear. Night after night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively over New York is not for our knowledge ”

“ The ways of our lords were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle, stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been within. ”

“ It all confirms the impression that grows on the visitor to America that Business has developed insensibly into a Religion, in more than the light, metaphorical sense of the words. It has its ritual and theology, its high places and its jargon, as well as its priests and martyrs. ”

“ Most colossal of all, it flashes momently out, a woman's head, all flame against the darkness. It is beautiful, passionless, in its simplicity and conventional representation queerly like an archaic Greek or early Egyptian figure. ”

“ In industries and businesses like this, where the majority of the employed are women, it ought to be a pretty stable sort of millennium. Men, perhaps, take longer to learn that kind of 'loyalty.'
In one corner of this store is the advertising department. There are gathered poets, artists, littérateurs, and mere intellectuals, all engaged in explaining to the upper middle-classes what there is for them to buy and why they should buy it. It is a life of good salary, steady hours, sufficient leisure, and entire dignity. ”

“ Suddenly, when she has surveyed mankind, she closes her left eye. Three times she winks, and then vanishes. No ordinary winks these, but portentous, terrifyingly steady, obliterating a great tract of the sky. ”

“ America has a childlike faith in advertising. They advertise here, everywhere, and in all ways. They shout your most private and sacred wants at you. Nothing is untouched. Every day I pass a wall, some five hundred square feet of which a gentleman has taken to declare that he is 'out' to break the Undertakers' Trust. ”

“ They are never smoking, never reading a paper, never even chewing. The expressions of their faces never change. It is impossible to guess what, or if anything, is in their minds. Hour upon hour they remain. Occasionally one will rise, in obedience to some call or revelation incomprehensible to us, and move out through the door into the clang and confusion of Broadway. ”

“ Turning with terrified relief from this exhibition of diabolic impotence, the stranger finds a divine hand writing slowly across the opposite quarter of the heavens its igneous message of warning to the nations, "Wear —— Underwear for Youths and Men-Boys." ”

“ Materially it is an immense building, containing all things that any upper-middle-class person could conceivably want. Such a store includes even Art, with the same bland omnipotence. If you wander into the vast auditorium, it is equal chances whether you hear a work of Beethoven, Victor Herbert, Schonberg, or Mr Hirsch. ”

“ In the intervals of activity they relapse into a curious trance, husbanding their vitality for the next crisis. I have watched them with terror and fascination. All day there are numbers of them sitting, immote and vacant, in rows and circles on the hard chairs in the hall. ”

“ Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night. ”

“ As a child he gets education, then evening-classes, continuation-schools, gymnasia, military training, swimming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study of anything under the sun, from palæography to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps, hospitals, ever-present medical attendance, and at the end a pension, and, I suppose, a store cemetery. And all for the price of a few hours' work a day, and a little loyalty to the 'establishment.' Can human hearts desire more? And, when all millionaires are as sensible, will they? ”

“ He is not interested in the romance of the road, like an English commercial traveller, only in its ever-changing end. These people are for ever sending off and receiving telegrams, messages, and cablegrams; they are continually telephoning ”