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+Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voice of the Machines
+       An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
+
+Author: Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+Release Date: January 15, 2007 [EBook #20361]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lee Spector and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+The Voice of the Machines
+
+An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
+
+
+BY
+
+
+Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+
+The Mount Tom Press
+Northampton, Massachusetts
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1906
+BY
+THE MOUNT TOM PRESS
+
+
+
+
+TO JENNETTE LEE
+
+  ... "Now and then my fancy caught
+  A flying glimpse of a good life beyond--
+  Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing,
+  Troy falling, and the ages coming back,
+  And ages coming forward."...
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+     I.--Machines as Seen from a Meadow
+    II.--As Seen through a Hatchway
+   III.--The Souls of Machines
+    IV.--Poets
+     V.--Gentlemen
+    VI.--Prophets
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
+
+     I.--As Good as Ours
+    II.--On Being Busy and Still
+   III.--On Not Showing Off
+    IV.--On Making People Proud of the World
+     V.--A Modest Universe
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE MACHINES AS POETS
+
+     I.--Plato and the General Electric Works
+    II.--Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth
+   III.--The Grudge against the Infinite
+    IV.--Symbolism in Modern Art
+     V.--The Machines as Artists
+    VI.--The Machines as Philosophers
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+     I.--The Idea of Incarnation
+    II.--The Idea of Size
+   III.--The Idea of Liberty
+    IV.--The Idea of Immortality
+     V.--The Idea of God
+    VI.--The Idea of the Unseen and the Intangible
+   VII.--The Idea of Great Men
+  VIII.--The Idea of Love and Comradeship
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MACHINES. AS SEEN FROM A MEADOW
+
+
+It would be difficult to find anything in the encyclopedia that would
+justify the claim that we are about to make, or anything in the
+dictionary. Even a poem--which is supposed to prove anything with a
+little of nothing--could hardly be found to prove it; but in this
+beginning hour of the twentieth century there are not a few of us--for
+the time at least allowed to exist upon the earth--who are obliged to
+say (with Luther), "Though every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, we
+cannot say otherwise--the locomotive is beautiful."
+
+As seen when one is looking at it as it is, and is not merely using
+it.
+
+As seen from a meadow.
+
+We had never thought to fall so low as this, or that the time would
+come when we would feel moved--all but compelled, in fact--to betray
+to a cold and discriminating world our poor, pitiful, one-adjective
+state.
+
+We do not know why a locomotive is beautiful. We are perfectly aware
+that it ought not to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for being
+beautiful--and of ourselves. We have attempted all possible words upon
+it--the most complimentary and worthy ones we know--words with the
+finer resonance in them, and the air of discrimination the soul loves.
+We cannot but say that several of these words from time to time have
+seemed almost satisfactory to our ears. They seem satisfactory also
+for general use in talking with people, and for introducing
+locomotives in conversation; but the next time we see a locomotive
+coming down the track, there is no help for us. We quail before the
+headlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as the voice of the
+hurrying people. Our little row of adjectives is vanished. All
+adjectives are vanished. They are as one.
+
+Unless the word "beautiful" is big enough to make room for a glorious,
+imperious, world-possessing, world-commanding beauty like this, we are
+no longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behind
+truth. Let it be shut in with its rim of hills--the word
+beautiful--its show of sunsets and its bouquets and its doilies and
+its songs of birds. We are seekers for a new word. It is the first
+hour of the twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so is the
+locomotive that conquers a hill. So is the telephone, piercing a
+thousand sunsets north to south, with the sound of a voice. The night
+is not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over the city, than the
+electric spark pushing the night one side, that the city may behold
+itself; and the hour is at hand--is even now upon us--when not the sun
+itself shall be more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping the
+sun in the midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while the
+will of a child to another child ticks round the earth. "Time shall be
+folded up as a scroll," saith the voice of Man, my Brother. "The
+spaces between the hills, to ME," saith the Voice, "shall be as though
+they were not."
+
+The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.
+
+It is the voice of the machines.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY
+
+
+In its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its
+conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented
+fact. The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a
+traditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life
+to-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out.
+Leaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the
+people of the world have had to be left out with it.
+
+Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see
+poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.
+
+The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his
+mother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards,
+he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by
+a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were
+built in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food has
+come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him
+by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the
+clothes he wears was flashed together by looms.
+
+The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion
+and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds
+that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a
+machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels
+or of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great
+whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the
+system--that is, the Machine--be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or
+spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the
+beginning of the world.
+
+The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a
+huge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main
+fact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very
+well, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may
+be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He
+learns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe,
+turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a
+life, will hardly be inclined to stop--to wait perchance--to ask him
+what he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He
+looks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of
+Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to
+the machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past
+him night and day,--miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked
+into the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it
+in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes
+around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full
+of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.
+
+He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All men," says Political
+Economy, "may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the
+other of three great classes of activity--production, consumption or
+distribution."
+
+The number of persons who are engaged in production outside of
+association with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one
+place, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of
+human beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities.
+
+The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of
+association with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few
+peddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.
+
+The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of
+association with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as
+consumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could be
+stopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be
+loaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the
+coal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed by
+another set of machines.
+
+So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs
+and wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found
+on the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to
+live this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him
+where he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his
+life, to see the sky--to be sure there was a sky. It is then his
+privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running
+belts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what this
+heaven is, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walled
+in forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels.
+
+"No inspiring emotions," says the literary definition, "ideas or
+conceptions can possibly be connected with machinery--or ever will
+be."
+
+What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of
+its natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the
+roof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the
+way of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that
+we, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally
+safe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take
+comfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around
+us. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our
+gates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows
+herds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the
+morning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have
+done what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have
+laid the boundary line of beauty?... The huge, hurrying, helpless
+world in its belts and spindles--the people who are going to be
+obliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little
+more--all this--the great strenuous problem--the defense of beauty,
+the saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of it
+with life-all these?... Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the
+noises of the street. A little longer ... the low singing to
+ourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our graves
+shall be as the passing of silence.
+
+Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society of
+his kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he
+wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not
+know. I only know how it is now.
+
+  They stay not in their hold
+  These stokers,
+  Stooping to hell
+  To feed a ship.
+  Below the ocean floors,
+  Before their awful doors
+  Bathed in flame,
+  I hear their human lives
+  Drip--drip.
+
+  Through the lolling aisles of comrades
+  In and out of sleep,
+  Troops of faces
+  To and fro of happy feet,
+  They haunt my eyes.
+  Their murky faces beckon me
+  From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
+  Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SOULS OF MACHINES
+
+
+It does not make very much difference to the machines whether there is
+poetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.
+
+It is not an abstract question to the people who are under the
+machines. Men who are under things want to know what the things are
+for, and they want to know what they are under them for. It is a very
+live, concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetry
+in machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it.
+
+There seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this world
+or the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is
+not bound up, in our modern age, with machinery. With the fate of
+machinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the
+characteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age is
+organization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little
+to be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the
+principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired
+principle--if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be
+expressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it--there is
+little to be hoped for in modern education.
+
+Modern government is a machine. The more modern a government is, the
+more the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It is
+made up of (1) corporations--huge machines employing machines, and (2)
+of trusts--huge machines that control machines that employ machines.
+Modern charity is a machine for getting people to help each other.
+Modern society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other.
+Modern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modern journalism
+is a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine for
+supplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machines
+cannot supply.
+
+Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable
+thing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better
+or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes
+little difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It
+has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for.
+We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We
+are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We
+breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more
+than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes,
+even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in
+machinery--that is if there is no beautiful and glorious
+interpretation of machinery for our modern life--there cannot be
+poetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of
+the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be.
+If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something,
+we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above
+our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are
+empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of
+darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our
+whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a
+Machine Age have a soul?
+
+If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea
+in its simplest form, for machinery itself--that is, the machines of
+steel and flame that minister to us--it will be possible to find a
+great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we
+have already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other
+machines--our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered--the
+better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that
+inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with
+machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern
+religion--(in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern
+education--the man-machine; for modern government--the crowd-machine;
+for modern art--the machine in which the crowd lives.
+
+If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because
+it is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modern
+world to connect inspiring ideas with.
+
+Johnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and
+shadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and
+looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a
+mist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps
+past. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it
+is as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in
+the wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled
+with childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to
+wonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown
+to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world
+lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over
+on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania--for its days and nights.
+I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen
+men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on
+a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the
+making and the welding place of the bones of the world.
+
+It is the object of this present writing to search out a world--a
+world a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know
+it and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be
+written across the world once more--written across this year of the
+world in the roar of its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannot
+quite see the word YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we
+hear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the
+machines themselves.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+POETS
+
+
+When, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modern
+life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the
+thing we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideas
+practical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that "it will always
+be practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal
+to the imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the
+real spirit we know exists in the real world.
+
+Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth century.
+
+Expectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are
+now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the
+earth.
+
+The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of
+John Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something of
+the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer
+of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this
+same age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of
+poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be
+lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead,
+this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more
+kinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the
+daring of their dreams.
+
+Pessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being in
+the real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of not
+being in enough of the real world.
+
+If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy
+expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall
+we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument?
+the minor poet?
+
+The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the
+doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first
+by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the
+door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and
+humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth
+playing upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of the
+mere outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of the
+thing called life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. He
+shall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over by
+machines--shadowed by weariness--to the men about him half comrade,
+half monk--going in and out among them silently, with some secret
+glory in his heart.
+
+If literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, who
+are putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers and
+brakemen--as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club,
+there would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--_i. e._, a
+great hope or great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that stands
+in the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor ęsthetic. It is
+sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a
+gentleman and a poet.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+GENTLEMEN
+
+
+The truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his
+work. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves
+his work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a
+gentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own employer.
+No matter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail
+to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is master
+of the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man who
+loves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make a
+man free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the
+ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what
+a gentleman's work is worth.
+
+The poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it,
+the men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that
+these men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of
+them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They
+cannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the
+autobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for him,
+possessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.
+
+Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number
+employed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than
+there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative
+in creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else
+there are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the fine
+arts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shops
+can hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather be
+preachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the much
+larger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemen
+in the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they would
+do the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing,
+and make every one else respect it.
+
+While the definition of a poet and a gentleman--that he is a man who
+loves his work--might appear to make a new division of society, it is
+a division that already exists in the actual life of the world, and
+constitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had.
+
+It may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter how
+prosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon this
+planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the
+most hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing
+in his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in
+spite of himself, and whether he knows it or not.
+
+So long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to
+him, so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal,
+the heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty and the
+unconquerableness of that man, and of that man's delight, shall be
+upon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all
+on earth who overhear heaven.
+
+Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal
+connected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet.
+It makes little difference what he says about it. In proportion as he
+has power with a thing; in proportion as he makes the thing--be it a
+bit of color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, or
+a throttle--in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or express
+what he wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and
+earth cannot make him otherwise.
+
+That the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward the
+machine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the
+apparent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in
+all essential respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has ever
+known an inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feeling
+toward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know that
+men are living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (their
+faces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but
+dying now, this very moment, to make a machine live,--martyrs of
+valves and wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, tireless,
+unconquerable men?
+
+To know an inventor the moment of his triumph,--the moment when,
+working his will before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent,
+massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls
+and the needs of their bodies,--to know an inventor at all is to know
+that at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep,
+soft as from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that
+Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and
+watching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and
+joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make,
+from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is,
+after all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and
+cog and wheel--is it not more than these to him standing before it
+there? It is the face of matter--who does not know it?--answering the
+face of the man, whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.
+
+What is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the
+men who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer and
+the mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Their
+days are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same
+unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They
+begin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and
+wheels, or of great waters.
+
+As I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was
+holding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag,
+and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him,
+headlight, clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every
+brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the
+switch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and
+gave the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched
+them, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid
+cloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to
+the Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the
+falling of smoke.
+
+Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot
+that was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a
+brakeman himself.
+
+Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but
+they love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to
+brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that
+their ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds
+of lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the
+outside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening
+lights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their
+endless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It is
+wrought into the very fibre of their being.
+
+Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the
+brakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see
+them--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and
+rocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.
+
+They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of
+their calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.
+
+Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the
+universe, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and
+stand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives
+the secret that throbs through it all.
+
+For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an
+ideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a
+life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this
+also is to have lived.
+
+The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad
+man that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest
+pertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of
+the present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much a
+symbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of
+the art of an heroic age.
+
+That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships,
+to turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years
+old. We find it accounted for not only in the observation and
+experience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do
+it at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets have
+admitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before
+mountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When the
+sailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on the
+decks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minor
+poets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and
+obliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close
+to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If
+he must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he
+selects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at
+night singing to his bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.
+There is not a passenger on the Empire State Express, this moment,
+being whirled to the West, who could not write a sonnet on it,--not a
+man of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through space
+behind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and
+write a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street
+could write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was
+dead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time to
+bring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still
+alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it is
+going to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns
+of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe
+where poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world,
+and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor
+and unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man
+who would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than
+to have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from
+the old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger
+where she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. He
+spends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in and
+out, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, and
+talking with them. Nothing can take him away.
+
+Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection
+for his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her
+breath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle of
+that ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who
+shall seek to define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory,
+in darkness or in day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of
+life. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in his
+engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to place
+his hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that
+this awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare to
+touch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour
+muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this,
+climbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It is
+impossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touch
+sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind can
+go, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the
+west--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because
+he means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a
+poet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,
+hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I
+always see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through
+the Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.
+
+Who am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to
+speak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that
+I should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling
+track--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the
+man in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he
+wears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and
+the cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words
+enough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life.
+Standing in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrill
+to his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of
+the splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of his
+life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as the
+singing a man would sing who felt his hand on the throttle of things.
+The engine is a soul to me--soul of the quiet face thundering
+past--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling it
+to the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it to
+the trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, that
+the might of the spirit of man has passed that way.
+
+If an engine is to be looked at from the point of view of the man who
+makes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a
+right to be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression of
+the human spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the human
+spirit, there shall be no escape for the children of this present
+world, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in it
+that shall hem life in, and bound it round on every side. The idealism
+and passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling he
+has about his machine, the power with which that machine expresses
+that feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations of this
+modern age, a fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulate
+and far and faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now from
+above, and now from below, and on every side of life. It is as though
+the very ground itself should speak,--speak to our poor, pitiful,
+unspiritual, matter-despising souls,--should command them to come
+forth, to live, to gaze into the heart of matter for the heart of God.
+It is so that the very dullest of us, standing among our machines, can
+hardly otherwise than guess the coming of some vast surprise,--the
+coming of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, our sons and
+daughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and our
+old men shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I do not dare to say
+it. What it means to our religion and to our life and to our art, this
+great athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I only know that so
+long as the fine arts, in an age like this, look down on the
+mechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so long
+as the church worships the laborer's God, but does not reverence
+labor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and none for
+women and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as there is no
+poet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this man, my
+brother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the engine
+shall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it shall
+be buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we have
+more preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into life
+insurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave their
+engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than in
+pulpits,--the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons
+say. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we
+shall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we
+fain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand
+choirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a
+fragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in
+the delight of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made
+a vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every
+word have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long
+as men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in
+sermons, I listen to engines.
+
+Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So
+it cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,
+blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,
+with all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of
+life sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be
+worshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love is
+her love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of the
+engineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is
+beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glass
+window is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is bound
+to come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great rough
+hand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the new
+church shall be known by men because it will be a day in which all
+worship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy house
+shall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries under
+the sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid at
+her feet.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+PROPHETS
+
+
+The world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating,
+the strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in
+poetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the
+church, religion will call itself something else. It is the business
+of a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were some
+other age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born in
+it is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in an
+age are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in a
+particular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries to
+do for him the better. If a church does not believe in a man's work as
+he believes in it, does not see some divine meaning and spirit in it
+and give him honor and standing and dignity for the divine meaning in
+it; if it is a church in which labor is secretly despised and in which
+it is openly patronized, in which a man has more honor for working
+feebly with his brain than for working passionately and perfectly with
+his hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. It is
+excommunicated by the will of Heaven and the nature of things, from
+the only Communion that is large enough for a man to belong to or for
+a God to bless.
+
+If there is one sign rather than another of religious possibility and
+spiritual worth in the men who do the world's work with machines
+to-day, it is that these men are never persuaded to attend a church
+that despises that work.
+
+Symposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is no
+need for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the
+house-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church
+that believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership
+in the world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the man who sings with
+his hands, "to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men who
+do not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?" If heaven
+itself (represented as a rich and idle place,--seats free in the
+evening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that he
+should despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find some
+excuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard to
+his present life. "Unless your God," says the man who sings with his
+hands, to those who pity him and do him good,--"unless your God is a
+God I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in a
+church."
+
+Behold it is written: The church that does not delight in these men
+and in what these men are for, as much as the street delights in them,
+shall give way to the street. The street is more beautiful. If the
+street is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church and
+sweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above
+it. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall men
+look down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than the
+world believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. It
+cannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, and
+that cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of
+that machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not
+worthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a
+better religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every
+town or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,
+one hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for
+more than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.
+The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other
+great believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are
+surrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the
+steeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the
+people. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of
+chimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are
+saying to the people.
+
+They will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.
+
+They will say it better.
+
+In the meantime they are not listening.
+
+Religion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with
+their ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By
+all poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading
+before them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that
+reaches across the age.
+
+      RAILROAD CROSSING
+    LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+AS GOOD AS OURS
+
+
+One is always hearing it said that if a thing is to be called poetic
+it must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them.
+The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection
+that, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not look
+it." The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it
+stands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language of
+the average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it is
+actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is often
+absurd. It is a rare machine which, when one looks for poetry in it,
+does not make itself ridiculous.
+
+The only answer that can be made to this objection is that a
+steam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as well
+as the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We
+live in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything
+in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over
+our heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height of
+absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when
+we look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at
+strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To
+suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose
+that He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express
+anything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.
+
+We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of
+everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do
+our living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselves
+with--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and
+football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them
+from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey
+anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying
+on a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense
+and spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a
+new fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it,
+to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the
+beginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could
+not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more
+futile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul
+than a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may
+be all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a
+failure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musical
+instruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing a
+black stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listen
+solemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tucked
+under his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughing
+and crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language of
+the violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivated
+enough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful and
+important parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracy
+of symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that
+can not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing
+could possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a
+tourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebration
+of the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have their
+outer senses, and these outer senses have to be learned one at a time
+by being flashed through with inner ones. Except to people who have
+tried it, nothing could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form of
+human expression. A reception--a roomful of people shouting at each
+other three inches away--is comical enough. So is handshaking. Looked
+at from the outside, what could be more unimpressive than the
+spectacle of the greatest dignitary of the United States put in a vise
+in his own house for three hours, having his hand squeezed by long
+rows of people? And, taken as a whole, scurrying about in its din,
+what could possibly be more grotesque than a great city--a city looked
+at from almost any adequate, respectable place for an immortal soul to
+look from--a star, for instance, or a beautiful life?
+
+Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels, every outer token that
+pertains to man is absurd and unfinished until some inner thing is put
+with it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to the other
+animals), rushing empty about space. New York is a spectacle for a
+squirrel to laugh at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man is
+a mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, desk-infesting animal.
+
+All these things being true of expression--both the expression of men
+and of God--the fact that machines which have poetry in them do not
+express it very well does not trouble me much. I do not forget the
+look of the first ocean-engine I ever saw--four or five stories of it;
+nor do I forget the look of the ocean-engine's engineer as in its
+mighty heart-beat he stood with his strange, happy, helpless "Twelve
+thousand horse-power, sir!" upon his lips.
+
+That first night with my first engineer still follows me. The time
+seems always coming back to me again when he brought me up from his
+whirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of stars, and left me--my new
+wonder all stumbling through me--alone with them and with my thoughts.
+
+  The engines breathe.
+  No sound but cinders on the sails
+  And the ghostly heave,
+  The voice the wind makes in the mast--
+  And dainty gales
+  And fluffs of mist and smoking stars
+  Floating past--
+  From night-lit funnels.
+
+  In the wild of the heart of God I stand.
+  Time and Space
+  Wheel past my face.
+  Forever. Everywhere.
+  I alone.
+  Beyond the Here and There
+  Now and Then
+  Of men,
+  Winds from the unknown
+  Round me blow
+  Blow to the unknown again.
+
+  Out in its solitude I hear the prow
+  Beyond the silence-crowded decks
+  Laughing and shouting
+  At Night,
+  Lashing the heads and necks
+  Of the lifted seas,
+  That in their flight
+  Urge onward
+  And rise and sweep and leap and sink
+  To the very brink
+  Of Heaven.
+
+  Timber and steel and smoke
+  And Sleep
+  Thousand-souled
+  A quiver,
+  A deadened thunder,
+  A vague and countless creep
+  Through the hold,
+  The weird and dusky chariot lunges on
+  Through Fate.
+  From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes
+  Above the houses of the deep
+  Their shadowy haunches fall and rise
+  --O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs
+  The flying of their hoofs,
+  Through the wonder and the dark
+  Where skies and waters meet
+  The shimmer of manes and knees
+  Dust of seas...
+  The sound of breathing, urge, confusion
+  And the beat, the starlight beat
+  Soft and far and stealthy-fleet
+  Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ON BEING BUSY AND STILL
+
+
+One of the hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines
+(excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the
+phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed
+to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey,
+and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being
+impressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed
+because it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked
+through its nose.
+
+The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to
+know it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his
+imagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the
+outside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a
+twin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.
+This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its
+poetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in
+the big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy
+paddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in
+the sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.
+
+People who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit that
+there is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A
+Dutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved so
+much that it does not flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it
+at all. The same general principle holds good with every machine that
+has been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works on
+it, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, if
+one watches it in its various stages, always consists in making a
+machine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive,
+puffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, was
+much more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the present
+one, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was more
+impressive than the present one. Every one remembers it,--the
+important-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty
+years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaseless
+water-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and its
+huge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations,
+ringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It was
+impossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without always
+thinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was always
+doing things--now at one end of the train and now at the other,
+ringing its bell down the track, blowing in at the windows, it fumed
+and spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to get
+to Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines
+were made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, and
+scarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he is
+going, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that.
+
+The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silent
+ones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of
+space--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting the
+world--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, for
+the very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are less
+showy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect.
+
+In proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses to
+look as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost always
+a sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some one
+else. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is a
+giant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding,
+is not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists at
+all in the modern age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it
+exists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep bass
+steamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam,
+which any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fashioned
+poetry. Every time it whistled it stopped.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ON NOT SHOWING OFF
+
+
+It is not true to say that the modern man does not care for poetry. He
+does not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. He
+cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care for
+eloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks
+to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts,
+and if the votes are to be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The
+doctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the most
+agreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like the
+doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He even prescribes less,
+and the reason that it is hard to be a modern minister (already cut
+down from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is that
+one has to practise more than one can preach.
+
+To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more than
+one says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelve
+hundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life around
+them is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out
+in the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life.
+The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people who
+have a gift for praying that way go, but the majority of
+people--people who have discovered that there are a thousand other
+ways of praying, and who like them better--stay away.
+
+When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed
+on the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The
+messages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all
+improves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of
+a hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is
+his duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough
+one--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from
+the inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on
+the outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like
+selfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it
+counts.
+
+On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the
+twentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not
+been known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a
+glass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to
+discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the
+ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would
+not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact
+that Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new
+heaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of
+it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope
+invented later, which never worked.
+
+Nothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R----
+typewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must
+have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The
+machine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and
+ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line
+with his foot.
+
+The same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery
+and through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The
+overshot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion,
+literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common men
+began to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came
+in--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no
+denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its
+work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but
+it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the
+drippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the
+turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work.
+The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand
+horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as
+six turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the
+Falls.
+
+The main fact about the modern man as regards poetry is, that he
+prefers poetry that has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It is
+because most of the poetry the modern man gets a chance to see to-day
+is merely going over the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal
+to the modern man. He supposes so himself. He supposes that a dynamo
+(forty street-cars on forty streets, flying through the dark) is not
+poetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, spellbound, more
+than any poetry that is being written. The things that are hidden--the
+things that are spiritual and wondering--are the ones that appeal to
+him. The idle, foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He gropes in
+his own body silently, harmlessly with the X-ray, and watches with awe
+the beating of his heart. He glories in inner essences, both in his
+life and in his art. He is the disciple of the X-ray, the defier of
+appearances. Why should a man who has seen the inside of matter care
+about appearances, either in little things or great? Or why argue
+about the man, or argue about the man's God, or quibble with words?
+Perhaps he is matter. Perhaps he is spirit. If he is spirit, he is
+matter-loving spirit, and if he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter.
+Every time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes it (as God makes
+mountains out of sunlight) a material thing. Every time he touches a
+material thing, in proportion as he touches it mightily he brings out
+inner light in it. He spiritualizes it. He abandons the glistening
+brass knocker--pleasing symbol to the outer sense--for a tiny knob on
+his porch door and a far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass knocker
+does not appeal to the spirit enough for the modern man, nor to the
+imagination. He wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bell
+with. He loves to wake the unseen. He will not even ring a door-bell
+if he can help it. He likes it better, by touching a button, to have a
+door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellar
+chewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs
+with a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He may be seen riding
+in three stories along his streets, but he takes his engines all off
+the tracks and crowds them into one engine and puts it out of sight.
+The more a thing is out of the sight of his eyes the more his soul
+sees it and glories in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden water
+spouts over his head and pours beneath his feet through his house.
+Hidden light creeps through the dark in it. The more might, the more
+subtlety. He hauls the whole human race around the crust of the earth
+with a vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids--sixty miles an
+hour--with invisible air. He photographs the tone of his voice on a
+platinum plate. His voice reaches across death with the platinum
+plate. He is heard of the unborn. If he speaks in either one of his
+worlds he takes two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut in with
+one. If he lives in either he wraps the other about him. He makes men
+walk on air. He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks open
+mountains with gas. The more perfect he makes his machines the more
+spiritual they are, the more their power hides itself. The more the
+machines of the man loom in human life the more they reach down into
+silence, and into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. The
+infinity which is the man's infinity is their infinity. The machines
+grasp all space for him. They lean out on ether. They are the man's
+machines. The man has made them and the man worships with them. From
+the first breath of flame, burning out the secret of the Dust to the
+last shadow of the dust--the breathless, soundless shadow of the dust,
+which he calls electricity--the man worships the invisible, the
+intangible. Electricity is his prophet. It sums him up. It sums up his
+modern world and the religion and the arts of his modern world. Out of
+all the machines that he has made the electric machine is the most
+modern because it is the most spiritual. The empty and futile look of
+a trolley wire does not trouble the modern man. It is his instinctive
+expression of himself. All the habits of electricity are his habits.
+Electricity has the modern man's temperament--the passion of being
+invisible and irresistible. The electric machine fills him with
+brotherhood and delight. It is the first of the machines that he can
+not help seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the man's highest
+self. His own soul beckons to him out of it.
+
+And the more electricity grows the more like the man it grows, the
+more spirit-like it is. The telegraph wire around the globe is melted
+into the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away from
+the dust. They envelop the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at
+last, unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light of
+stars,--fights its way to God.
+
+The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless ground or through the
+froth of heaven for the spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which
+makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makes
+earth out of air, he delves into the deepest sea as a cloud. He
+strides heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment at last of
+ELECTRICITY--the archangel of matter.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD
+
+
+Religion consists in being proud of the Creator. Poetry is largely the
+same feeling--a kind of personal joy one takes in the way the world is
+made and is being made every morning. The true lover of nature is
+touched with a kind of cosmic family pride every time he looks up from
+his work--sees the night and morning, still and splendid, hanging over
+him. Probably if there were another universe than this one, to go and
+visit in, or if there were an extra Creator we could go to--some of
+us--and boast about the one we have, it would afford infinite relief
+among many classes of people--especially poets.
+
+The most common sign that poetry, real poetry, exists in the modern
+human heart is the pride that people are taking in the world. The
+typical modern man, whatever may be said or not said of his religion,
+of his attitude toward the maker of the world, has regular and almost
+daily habits of being proud of the world.
+
+In the twentieth century the best way for a man to worship God is
+going to be to realize his own nature, to recognize what he is for,
+and be a god, too. We believe to-day that the best recognition of God
+consists in recognizing the fact that he is not a mere God who does
+divine things himself, but a God who can make others do them.
+
+Looked at from the point of view of a mere God who does divine things
+himself, an earthquake, for instance, may be called a rather feeble
+affair, a slight jar to a ball going ---- miles an hour--a Creator
+could do little less, if He gave a bare thought to it--but when I
+waked a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in my own house as
+if it were a hammock, and was told that some men down in Hazardville,
+Connecticut, had managed to shake the planet like that, with some
+gunpowder they had made, I felt a new respect for Messrs. ---- and Co.
+I was proud of man, my brother. Does he not shake loose the Force of
+Gravity--make the very hand of God to tremble? To his thoughts the
+very hills, with their hearts of stone, make soft responses--when he
+thinks them.
+
+The Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in '76, under its sky of iron and
+glass, is remembered by many people the day they saw it first as one
+of the great experiences of life. Like some vast, Titanic spirit, soul
+of a thousand, thousand wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mighty
+silence there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve-year-old boy, at
+least, the thought of the hour he spent with that engine first is a
+thought he sings and prays with to this day. His lips trembled before
+it. He sought to hide himself in its presence. Why had no one ever
+taught him anything before? As he looks back through his life there is
+one experience that stands out by itself in all those boyhood
+years--the choking in his throat--the strange grip upon him--upon his
+body and upon his soul--as of some awful unseen Hand reaching down
+Space to him, drawing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed child
+being held up before It--held up to an infinite fact, that he might
+look at it again and again.
+
+The first conception of what the life of man was like, of what it
+might be like, came to at least one immortal soul not from lips that
+he loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice behind a desk,
+but from a machine. To this day that Corliss engine is the engine of
+dreams, the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and to the soul. It
+rebuilds the universe. It is the opportunity of beauty throughout
+life, the symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of the unity of
+nations, and of the worship of God. In silence--like the soft far
+running of the sky--it wrought upon him there; like some heroic human
+spirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, through miles of aisles, and
+crowds of gazers, it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as the
+beat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering matter, of the clay
+conquering God.
+
+Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices surrounded me. It was the
+first hearing of the psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was like
+the spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it--nay, the
+vision that was builded in it--was the vision of the age to be: the
+vision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone of
+his sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of his
+soul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, and
+with the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship with
+Creation morning, and into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion)
+of the might and gentleness of God.
+
+There seem to be two ways to worship Him. One way is to gaze upon the
+great Machine that He has made, to watch it running softly above us
+all, moonlight and starlight, and winter and summer, rain and
+snowflakes, and growing things. Another way is to worship Him not only
+because He has made the vast and still machine of creation, in the
+beating of whose days and nights we live our lives, but because He has
+made a Machine that can make machines--because out of the dust of the
+earth He has made a Machine that shall take more of the dust of the
+earth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd it into steel and iron and
+say, "Go ye now, depths of the earth--heights of heaven--serve ye me.
+I, too, am God. Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the
+spirit that is in thee is my spirit. I also--even I also--am God!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A MODEST UNIVERSE
+
+
+I have heard it objected that a machine does not take hold of a man
+with its great ideas while he stands and watches it. It does not make
+him feel its great ideas. And therefore it is denied that it is
+poetic.
+
+The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts of machinery is not
+denied. What seems to be lacking in the machines from the artistic
+point of view at present is a mere knack of making the faces plain and
+literal-looking. Grasshoppers would be more appreciated by more people
+if they were made with microscopes on,--either the grasshoppers or the
+people.
+
+If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain and
+large enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by
+it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have
+been) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies
+towering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a
+grasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across
+valleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and
+villages--would have been one of the impressive features of human
+life. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a
+grasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was
+creative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of
+having such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping
+softly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and
+yet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread
+over several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not
+impressed by it.
+
+But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There
+is something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of
+machinery. "The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is
+not poetic." "A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as
+its form expresses its nature." Mechanical inventions may stand for
+impressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the
+facts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses
+those facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of
+battle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full of
+dynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not.
+
+That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not
+be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping
+toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it,
+if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and
+criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember
+the day when he all but lost his life because
+
+  A pill-box by the river's brim
+  A simple pill-box was to him
+  And nothing more.
+
+Wordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an
+issue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its
+language, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it
+looks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The
+language is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new
+language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a
+language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry
+in machinery.
+
+The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it
+does not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I,
+comrade nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor God's
+machine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the
+meaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we
+are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile,
+creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles
+away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its
+Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The
+ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of
+our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not
+HERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our
+veins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is
+born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the
+immeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to
+be--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to
+dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over
+the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the
+infinite, beckon and are still.
+
+I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express
+themselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know
+that when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looks
+out upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, with
+their huge machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out upon me.
+I rest.
+
+I know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of
+the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my
+soul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me I
+grow strong and glad.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE MACHINES AS POETS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS
+
+
+I have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the
+main lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near by
+and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about
+art. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we
+have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do
+now--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of things
+one wishes one had said, afterward.
+
+We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about
+other things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time,
+that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things
+That Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.
+
+Brim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than I
+have a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stop
+to it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this world
+that have been beautiful a long while, without having people--well,
+people like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all these
+modern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there is
+something one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough to
+go with the rest. I'm afraid Brim gets a little personal in talking
+with me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in a
+conversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem to
+lead logically to one's going away, and trying to find afterwards,
+some thing that is the matter with him.
+
+"The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is," I say (on paper, afterwards,
+as the train speeds away), "that you have a false-classic or
+Stucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked all
+these things--trolley cars, cables, locomotives,--seen the beautiful
+in them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the way
+we do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when one
+thinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeks
+liked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would
+like now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin to
+enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the
+chance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more
+out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I
+suspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William
+Watson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in
+Schenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anything
+else for the rest of their natural lives."
+
+I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the
+machines that a Greek would see, as yet.
+
+But I have seen enough.
+
+I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small
+enough, welding the nations together before my eyes.
+
+I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of
+visions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the
+world.
+
+I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men--the five thousand of
+them--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted
+railroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them
+there with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities,
+putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that
+Bliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them ...
+brother-artists every one ... in the glory ... in the dark ...
+Vulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skyscrapers,
+steam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and
+the earth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
+
+
+The poetry of machinery to-day is a mere matter of fact--a part of the
+daily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing the
+world wants to know about machinery is not that there is poetry in it,
+but that the poetry which the common people have already found there,
+has a right to be there. We have the fact. It is the theory to put
+with the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles us
+most. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solid
+comfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory to
+approve of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make very
+much difference.
+
+1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is an expression of the soul.
+
+2. It expresses the soul (1) of the individual man who creates the
+machine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine the
+engineer.
+
+3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God who can make men who can
+thus express their souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the least
+sense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like this
+is not clever enough with all his powers to find a God, and to worship
+a God, he can worship himself. It is because the poetry of machinery
+is the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead of
+immeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally taken
+for granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned more
+of the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machines
+that have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than from
+the poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousand
+men and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and has
+his bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed by
+Abraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--the
+argument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight the
+locomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whether
+it wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered by
+steamships. It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new one.
+Seers and poets have made poetry out of it for two thousand years.
+Machinery is making the poetry mean something. Every new invention in
+matter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with
+ideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it than
+was ever dreamed of in Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard to
+show that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the most
+literary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events of
+the nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought that
+any one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is more
+wonderful than anything that has ever been said on it.
+
+"This is all very true," interrupts the Logical Person, "about
+printing presses and looms and everything else--one could go on
+forever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loom
+has made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browning
+would have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loom
+has freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is a
+fit theme for poetry." "Besides"--breaks in the Minor Poet--"there is
+a difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its being
+beautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautiful
+the way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?"
+
+This brings to a point the whole question as to where the definition
+of beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing's
+being considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question
+"Is a thing beautiful?" resolves itself into "How large has a
+beautiful thing a right to be?" A man's theory of beauty depends, in a
+universe like this, upon how much of the universe he will let into it.
+If he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and
+passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if a
+beautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggests
+boundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It is
+something--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever it
+is or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life
+is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they
+see more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental
+idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetry
+were made--most of them--before infinity was discovered.
+
+Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind of
+huge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but the
+idea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us or
+with our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to do
+with IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience of
+infinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparatively
+speaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more modern
+discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modern
+machinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention for
+being infinite.
+
+The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing
+the same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time
+and space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this
+very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity
+shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the
+other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little
+difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is
+everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as
+much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The
+locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives
+her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches
+the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of
+infinity.
+
+This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional
+poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our
+traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established
+institution in human life, and infinity is not.
+
+No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world
+was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were
+afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over
+them. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people
+to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably
+employed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured
+policeman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.
+
+The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference
+was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky
+off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a
+kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and
+homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the
+sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough.
+Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it
+beautiful.
+
+Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another
+way--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to
+make it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new
+religion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the
+ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars,
+its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the
+past. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our
+human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests'
+wilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with
+little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.
+
+It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has
+seen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what
+is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out
+at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about
+philosophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main fact
+about us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands of
+years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding
+themselves.
+
+But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by
+a new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud
+of steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love,
+the new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of
+nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with
+falling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws
+down Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It
+is a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new
+widemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and
+waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.
+
+The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us--the mere
+hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God--is the
+neighborhood of human life.
+
+Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses
+the greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that
+the soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.
+
+Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of
+infinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is
+infinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is.
+The infinity of man is no longer a thing that the poet takes--that he
+makes an idea out of--Machinery makes it a matter of fact.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE
+
+
+The main thing the nineteenth century has done in literature has been
+the gradual sorting out of poets into two classes--those who like the
+infinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and those who have not. It
+seems reasonable to say that the poets who have habits of infinity, of
+space-conquering (like our vast machines), who seek the suggestive and
+immeasurable in the things they see about them--poets who like
+infinity, will be the poets to whom we will have to look to reveal to
+us the characteristic and real poetry of this modern world. The other
+poets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the modern world, to
+say nothing of singing in it. They do not feel at home in it. The
+classic-walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. It is too
+savagely large, too various and unspeakable and unfinished. He looks
+at the sky of it--the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, to which it
+sings and lifts itself--with a strange, cold, hidden dread down in his
+heart. To him it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness.
+Its literature--its art with its infinite life in it, is a blur of
+vagueness. He complains because mobs of images are allowed in it. It
+is full of huddled associations. When Carlyle appeared, the
+Stucco-Greek mind grudgingly admitted that he was 'effective.' A man
+who could use words as other men used things, who could put a pen down
+on paper in such a way as to lift men out from the boundaries of their
+lives and make them live in other lives and in other ages, who could
+lend them his own soul, had to have something said about him;
+something very good and so it was said, but he was not an "artist."
+From the same point of view and to the same people Browning was a mere
+great man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a man who went
+about living and loving things, with a few blind words opening the
+eyes of the blind. It had to be admitted that Robert Browning could
+make men who had never looked at their brothers' faces dwell for days
+in their souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, too, seer,
+lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of his violins conquering a new
+heaven for us, had great conceptions and was a musical genius without
+the slightest doubt, but he was not an "artist." He never worked his
+conceptions out. His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. They
+are nothing if they are not played again and again. For twenty or
+thirty years Richard Wagner was outlawed because his music was
+infinitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres). People seemed
+to want him to write cosy, homelike music.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART
+
+  "_So I drop downward from the wonderment
+  Of timelessness and space, in which were blent
+  The wind, the sunshine and the wanderings
+  Of all the planets--to the little things
+  That are my grass and flowers, and am content._"
+
+
+This prejudice against the infinite, or desire to avoid as much as
+possible all personal contact with it, betrays itself most commonly,
+perhaps, in people who have what might be called the domestic feeling,
+who consciously or unconsciously demand the domestic touch in a
+landscape before they are ready to call it beautiful. The typical
+American woman, unless she has unusual gifts or training, if she is
+left entirely to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery. Even if her
+imagination has been somewhat cultivated and deepened, so that she
+feels that a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in order to
+be beautiful, she still chooses nooks and ravines, as a rule, to be
+happy in--places roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in with
+beauty on every side. She is not without her due respect and
+admiration for a mountain, but she does not want it to be too large,
+or too near the stars, if she has to live with it day and night; and
+if the truth were told--even at its best she finds a mountain distant,
+impersonal, uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she does not see
+beauty in the wide plain. There is something in her being that makes
+her bashful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she can snuggle up
+to. It is essentially the bird's taste in scenery. "Give me a nest, O
+Lord, under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy glory." A bush or a
+tree with two or three other bushes or trees near by, and just enough
+sky to go with it--is it not enough?
+
+The average man is like the average woman in this regard except that
+he is less so. The fact seems to be that the average human being (like
+the average poet), at least for everyday purposes, does not want any
+more of the world around him than he can use, or than he can put
+somewhere. If there is so much more of the world than one can use, or
+than anyone else can use, what is the possible object of living where
+one cannot help being reminded of it?
+
+The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge against
+the infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pine
+trees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasant
+things about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look at
+them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they
+would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines
+singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the
+world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious
+mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or
+unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a
+single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole
+skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not want
+a whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes as
+near to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world like
+this, could expect. It is the one tree of all others that profoundly
+suggests, every time the light falls upon it or the wind stirs through
+it, THE THINGS THAT MAN CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlight
+and its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the monument of the
+woods, to The Intangible, and The Invisible, to the spirituality of
+matter. Who shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit of the
+pine? And who, who has ever looked upon the pines--who has seen them
+climbing the hills in crowds, drinking at the sun--has not felt that
+however we may take to them personally they are the Chosen People
+among the trees? To pass from the voice of them to the voice of the
+common leaves is to pass from the temple to the street. In the rest of
+the forest all the leaves seem to be full of one another's din--of
+rattle and chatter--heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voice
+of every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, and
+the whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice of
+the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-things
+that human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from the
+presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over our heads.
+
+Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the pine in the imagination
+is not that it is more beautiful in itself than other trees, but that
+the beauty of the pine seems more symbolic than other beauty, and
+symbolic of more and of greater things. It is full of the sturdiness
+and strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the tree to see the
+sky with, and its voice is the voice of the horizons, the voice of the
+marriage of the heavens and the earth; and not only is there more of
+the sky in it, and more of the kingdom of the air and of the place of
+Sleep, but there is more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart
+of the earth. No other tree can be mutilated like the pine by the hand
+of man and still keep a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty
+about it and about all the place where it stands. A whole row of them,
+with their left arms cut off for passing wires, standing severe and
+stately, their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help being
+beautiful. The beauty is symbolic and infinite. It cannot be taken
+away. If the entire street-side of a row of common, ordinary
+middle-class trees were cut away there would be nothing to do with the
+maimed and helpless things but to cut them down--remove their misery
+from all men's sight. To lop away the half of a pine is only to see
+how beautiful the other half is. The other half has the infinite in
+it. However little of a pine is left it suggests everything there is.
+It points to the universe and beckons to the Night and the Day. The
+infinite still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the prophet of trees.
+In the sad lands it but grows more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit
+of the tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite--of
+everywhere--wherever its shadow falls. I have heard the sound of a
+hammer in the street and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine
+woods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud catches the great empty
+spaces of night out of heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers
+all sound into itself--echoes it along the infinite.
+
+The pine may be said to be the symbol of the beauty in machinery,
+because it is beautiful the way an electric light is beautiful, or an
+electric-lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty that belong to
+life: finite beauty, in that its beauty can be seen in itself, and
+infinite beauty in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of the
+beauty that cannot be seen, the beauty that dwells around it.
+
+What is going to be called the typical power of the colossal art,
+myriad-nationed, undreamed of men before, now gathering in our modern
+life, is its symbolic power, its power of standing for more than
+itself.
+
+Every great invention of modern mechanical art and modern fine art has
+held within it an extraordinary power of playing upon associations, of
+playing upon the spirits and essences of things until the outer senses
+are all gathered up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were meant to
+be melted, into inner ones. What is wrought before the eyes of a man
+at last by a great modern picture is not the picture that fronts him
+on the wall, but a picture behind the picture, painted with the flame
+of the heart on the eternal part of him. It is the business of a great
+modern work of art to bring a man face to face with the greatness from
+which it came. Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite,--and a
+man and a woman. A picture with this feeling of the infinite painted
+in it--behind it--which produces this feeling of the infinite in other
+men by playing upon the infinite in their own lives, is a typical
+modern masterpiece.
+
+The days when the infinite is not in our own lives we do not see it.
+If the infinite is in our own lives, and we do not like it there, we
+do not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, or in a Corliss
+engine--a picture of the face of All-Man, mastering the
+earth--silent--lifted to heaven.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS
+
+
+It is not necessary, in order to connect a railway train with the
+infinite, to see it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a huge
+white hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite as infinite
+flying through granite in Hoosac Mountain. Most people who do not
+think there is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with flying
+through granite as a trait of the infinite in a locomotive, and yet
+these same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to where
+infinity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky somewhere)--if they
+could watch one night after night plowing through planets--would want
+a poem written about it at once.
+
+A man who has a theory he does not see poetry in a locomotive, does
+not see it because theoretically he does not connect it with infinite
+things: the things that poetry is usually about. The idea that the
+infinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run on
+a track (and be all the more infinite for not running off the track),
+does not occur to him. The first thing he does when he is told to look
+for the infinite in the world is to stop and think a moment, where he
+is, and then look for it somewhere else.
+
+It would seem to be the first idea of the infinite, in being infinite,
+not to be anywhere else. It could not be anywhere else if it tried;
+and if a locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in and out of the
+fiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry in
+it are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matter
+of seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing it in enough of its actual
+relations as it is, to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the
+order, the energy, and the restfulness of the whole universe are
+pulsing there through its wheels.
+
+The times when we do not feel poetry in a locomotive are the times
+when we are not matter-of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough of
+its actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makes
+anything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as
+the symbol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded symbol of
+everything else in the universe--the summing up of everything
+else--another whisper of God's.
+
+Have I not seen the great Sun Itself, from out of its huge heaven,
+packed in a seed and blown about on a wind? I have seen the leaves of
+the trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listened
+with my soul--thousands of years--I have heard The Night and The Day
+creeping softly through mountains. People called it geology.
+
+It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by going to the infinite, he
+is going to be infinite where he is. He is carving it on the hills,
+tunneling it through the rocks of the earth, piling it up on the crust
+of it, with winds and waters and flame and steel he is writing it on
+all things--that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The whole
+planet is his signature.
+
+If what the modern man is trying to say in his modern age is his own
+infinity, it naturally follows that the only way a modern artist can
+be a great artist in a modern age is to say in that age that man is
+infinite, better than any one else is saying it.
+
+The best way to express this infinity of man is to seek out the things
+in the life of the man which are the symbols of his infinity--which
+suggest his infinity the most--and then play on those symbols and let
+those symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program is
+something like this. The modern age means the infinity of man. Modern
+art means symbolism of man's infinity. The best symbol of the man's
+infinity the poet can find, in this world the man has made, is The
+Machine.
+
+At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down
+the long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud
+floating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long
+wavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a
+great Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it
+almost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud
+propelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen
+a broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train
+of cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its
+whistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire
+by night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither
+is the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning
+building pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the
+car-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid
+Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this
+ghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it,
+gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away
+into heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have
+seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or
+passing of the spirit of the age.
+
+When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting
+Number Eight to Springfield.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS
+
+
+If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats
+quietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then
+could watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before our
+eyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and their
+last wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to
+know why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their
+new things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.
+
+Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be
+arranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery
+seems to be to every man's personal everyday instinct and experience.
+We have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it.
+
+I do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But
+there is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one
+permission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable to
+enjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I felt
+I had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be
+skipped.
+
+1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.
+
+2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals
+the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.
+
+3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately
+expressed.
+
+4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideas
+expressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry and
+of the imagination and the soul--infinity and the two forms of
+infinity, the liberty and the unity of man.
+
+5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinery
+because machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurable
+ideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurable
+things, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is in
+the mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine is
+beautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world
+contains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unity
+of all men's lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is now
+being wrought out before our eyes upon the face of the earth.
+
+6. It is only from the point of view of a nightingale or a sonnet that
+the ęsthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be
+criticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurable
+ideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;
+the more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, and
+upon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and
+satisfying they are.
+
+7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will be
+the man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. These
+ideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about the
+lives of all of us--might be stated roughly as follows:
+
+  The idea of the incarnation--the god in the body of the man.
+  The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from others.
+  The idea of unity--the soul's rescue from its mere self.
+  The idea of the Spirit--the Unseen and Intangible.
+  The idea of immortality.
+  The cosmic idea of God.
+  The practical idea of invoking great men.
+  The religious idea of love and comradeship.
+
+And nearly every other idea that makes of itself a song or a prayer in
+the human spirit.
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE IDEA OF INCARNATION
+
+  "_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,
+
+  And found it not--but many things beside;
+  Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.
+  And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.
+
+  Then wandering upward through the solid earth
+  With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,
+  I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,
+
+  And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie
+  Safe in the dust or ride along the sky--
+  Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'"
+
+
+The grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hop
+for his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watching
+him--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loom
+up on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one of
+the great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumps
+forty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as well
+as any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make
+two hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course,
+that the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolley
+to do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use things
+outside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everything
+outside him serve him as if he had it on his own body--uses a whole
+universe every day without the trouble of always having to carry it
+around with him. He gets his will out of the ground and even out of
+the air. He lays hold of the universe and makes arms and legs out of
+it. If he wants at any time, for any reason, more body than he was
+made with, he has his soul reach out over or around the planet a
+little farther and draw it in for him.
+
+The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not differ from the man in
+that he has a soul and body both, but his soul and body seem to be
+perfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably the
+best (and the worst) that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if he
+has one, that it is in his legs--that he really has his wits about
+him.
+
+Looked at superficially, or from the point of view of the next hop, it
+can hardly be denied that the body the human soul has been fitted out
+with is a rather inferior affair. From the point of view of any
+respectable or ordinarily well-equipped animal the human body--the one
+accorded to the average human being in the great show of
+creation--almost looks sometimes as if God really must have made it as
+a kind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on the
+rest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very moment
+he was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the
+animals man should be immortal--and had let it go at that. With the
+exception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra
+fold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the most
+unexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedingly
+unlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to
+any one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with our hands and
+feet, any animal on earth could tell us, are things we do not do as
+well as men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as well as we did
+when we were born. Our very babies are our superiors.
+
+The only defence we are able to make when we are arraigned before the
+bar of creation, seems to be, that while some of the powers we have
+exhibited have been very obviously lost, we have gained some very fine
+new invisible ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all,--our
+nerves, for instance,--the mentalized condition of our organs. And
+then, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter.
+When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the
+judgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking
+at us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion,
+we hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in
+us. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well
+our bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean
+is, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large,
+or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well
+arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a
+superior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to
+appreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can
+deny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale,
+little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on
+this earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we
+can. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before
+The Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all
+summer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost
+always under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it
+likes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in
+thousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we
+can well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughter
+at us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishes
+peeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still,
+underworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling,
+in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, it
+is true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on the
+planet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of staying
+carefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much by
+ourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise,
+called civilization, we keep each other in countenance after a
+fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when we
+stop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the others
+see us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to,
+and have it done with.
+
+It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up and
+down the world,--looking upon the man's body,--the little funny one
+that he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking upon
+the one that he really has. When one considers what a man actually
+does, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he
+has been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of
+central nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of
+infinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, of
+Nothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There
+is something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out and
+incomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say,
+but not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently,
+is a kind of light there is in it.
+
+But the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same light
+that reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames upon
+heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it,
+I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and
+worshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great waters
+and the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for a
+body, which the man has.
+
+I go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash of
+black and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death,
+disgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills,
+and the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn the
+papers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out through
+the dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and the
+Philippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices of
+the nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the
+man. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of the
+man meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watched
+them on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power,
+ninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, ... thundering aisles of
+souls ... on into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of the
+man.
+
+And when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently across
+heaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of the
+man is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, over
+it, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look,
+since I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon the countenance
+of the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or resting
+in the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reaches
+out around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars and
+beyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, that
+shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wireless
+telegraph and steel, or know the sound of its going? Now, when I see
+it, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. Like a low thunder it
+reaches around the crust of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle
+body (oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over the hill of the
+sea, soft and stately as the walking of the clouds in the upper air.
+
+Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always
+coming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the
+dark, "And I am here, too!"
+
+Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel
+Himself?
+
+And so it has come to pass, this vision I have seen with my own
+eyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body,
+going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and Space.
+Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a
+dream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his
+hand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the
+whole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist,
+the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of
+the ships.
+
+  Between the seas and skies
+  The Shuttle flies
+  Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep,
+  Thousand-sailed,
+  Half in waking, half in sleep.
+
+  Glistening calms and shouting gales
+  Water-gold and green,
+  And many a heavenly-minded blue
+  It thrusts and shudders through,
+  Past my starlight,
+  Past the glow of suns I know,
+  Weaving fates,
+  Loves and hates
+  In the Sea--
+  The stately Shuttle
+  To and fro,
+  Mast by mast,
+  Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.
+  Flights of Days and Nights
+  Flies fast.
+
+It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the
+modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and
+holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that
+machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging
+for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded
+into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a
+great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and
+the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities,
+making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and
+rolling out the roads of continents.
+
+If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet
+there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against
+us--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have
+almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man
+wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely
+hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for
+him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man
+and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He
+ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he
+lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him,
+"Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?"
+
+The trains like spirits flock to him.
+
+There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my
+pocket it sings.
+
+In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.
+
+I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale
+and small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to
+tell the truth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE IDEA OF SIZE
+
+
+Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount
+Tom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in
+machinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely
+being polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain,
+not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no
+place for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the
+trouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.
+Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening
+particularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and
+the hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and
+symbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity
+and Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets
+worse than other people's genealogies.
+
+But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just
+over the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations
+as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they
+will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It
+would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be
+agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious
+matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of
+course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the
+risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next
+few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a
+regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I
+do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must
+say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I
+would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very
+small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are
+more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering
+generality.
+
+I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at
+least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking
+down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever
+it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for
+me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very
+large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling,
+every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very
+conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I
+like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are not
+the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always
+at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a
+world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds
+I cannot see."
+
+The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on
+is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What I
+really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small
+or large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken
+iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of
+them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.
+I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the
+work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be
+done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the
+globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much
+of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it,
+every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing
+we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a
+young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred
+more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do
+up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or
+stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it
+does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or
+how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were
+all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so
+often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it
+out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was
+mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are
+thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be
+old-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very
+big earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spider
+that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be
+ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The
+universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a
+little compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a
+pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a
+single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever
+been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little
+wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for
+thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE IDEA OF LIBERTY
+
+
+Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was
+getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in
+and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day
+looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.
+I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a
+mile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see
+that I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings
+were hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not
+get myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look at
+it impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the
+universe, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the
+sunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe
+before. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt
+that history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.
+
+I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it
+and got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my
+friends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other
+uncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw
+it, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I
+discovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum
+for all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it was
+going to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not
+get myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun
+peeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flustered
+me--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I
+found myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what
+it would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to
+be. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably
+be too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.
+
+I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelée last summer. I
+resented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.
+
+The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a
+comparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only
+afforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It
+could not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was
+underneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. The
+feeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could
+not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken
+body and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been
+asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted
+to or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground
+underneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living
+every day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being
+asked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and
+found institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and
+ruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in space to burn itself
+up--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or
+bit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time
+and pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to
+the dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "You
+might as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelée in the
+face," I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, set
+down helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something
+all fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust
+or geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any
+place after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and
+all ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful
+ceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is
+seething beneath your feet."
+
+It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of
+this earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it,
+without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round
+swindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with
+all of us on it, laughing at us.
+
+I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelée broke out. I
+went wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to
+get warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all
+subjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It
+was a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had
+let through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground
+simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured
+the earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.
+I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming
+as the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the
+fires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss
+of outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and
+gradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both,
+both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would
+have to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race
+was going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little
+ones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just
+outside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all in
+a swirl of snowdrifts.
+
+I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I
+have always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human
+interest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if
+the earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract
+with the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off
+all of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a
+comparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far
+out at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual
+capacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was
+something distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if
+we had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this
+injured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I
+could not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out
+of the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing
+afar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.
+
+Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was
+standing as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or
+flowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I
+defied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to
+keep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me,
+of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if
+the soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness
+would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an
+inventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of
+the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be
+maltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had
+he not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet,
+flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homes
+out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of
+the mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.
+
+It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was
+when it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead
+of having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by
+apparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great
+nations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All
+the young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the ends
+or tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still
+at work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to
+have things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any
+afternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and
+playing duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.
+
+It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at
+any given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we
+like.
+
+I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just
+what the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would
+make some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if
+the sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged
+something, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely
+that the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries
+for nothing. The things they have done against him have been the
+making of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in
+the earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him
+and left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew
+what to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has
+had his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is
+only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think
+of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world
+with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can
+only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he
+makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like
+this are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath
+out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with
+poisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers,
+and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with
+a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in
+the great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night
+like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a
+breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he
+is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands
+of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without
+the copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought
+thousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need not
+fear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an
+action of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste
+of heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man
+like this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms
+him or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shall
+be as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire
+and wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and
+Nothing are his servants.
+
+The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics
+saying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off
+neglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision
+of all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in
+furs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep
+warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats
+on giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.
+It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:
+"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.
+Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At
+all events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet
+he's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful
+impossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking
+for."
+
+A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its
+street pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,
+which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which
+has its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is
+over the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights
+railway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping
+them, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a
+race like this could not find some way at least of managing its own
+planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming
+it, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed
+down in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the
+waves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden
+almost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at
+herself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things
+nowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock
+company or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that a
+thousand years from now we will not have found some other use for
+moonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be
+manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating
+houses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from
+door to door in cases and bottles.
+
+First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with
+a planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it,
+outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea
+that we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be
+more likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we
+ought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be
+much, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our
+continents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from
+the center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what
+science is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick
+out something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We
+manufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet
+as we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things,
+we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one
+wants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and
+mechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected
+enough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwest
+has just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the
+force of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or
+flag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over
+the edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of
+gravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a
+glance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or
+so (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.),
+everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure
+would gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When
+completed it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space
+(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and
+more). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a
+connection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one
+would care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that
+would always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up all
+the raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on the
+others. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station to
+the planets in general that would be useful. They would know what we
+want, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where we
+could.
+
+All this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult to
+tell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talking
+of a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is no
+telling about him--that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going
+son of God and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on,
+with quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes are
+prophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, Gentle
+Reader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground is
+still beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us notice
+stars more.
+
+In the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affair
+like this one single planet, need not worry us much.
+
+I still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeing
+it--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same
+old green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sun
+does. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and
+of love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man,
+running about and strutting, flying through space on it, all his
+interests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning to
+worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds or
+with this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand or
+deck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was.
+Long after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthest
+breath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises around
+you, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your round
+white cloud, rowing faithfully through space!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY
+
+
+If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around
+to my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not
+at all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I
+should do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it was
+for. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want
+to settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being
+conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first
+thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it
+might be overdoing things a little.
+
+I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men
+and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I
+know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be
+lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in
+immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I
+were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting
+out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that
+wanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier
+and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how
+long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure
+in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and
+had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest
+preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is
+only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have
+the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality
+I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this
+very moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United
+States of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I
+feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to
+an infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or praying
+to Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging
+Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it
+sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to
+His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes,
+and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal
+throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his
+sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a
+petition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel
+as if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.
+
+I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was
+asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great
+blackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed
+out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of
+light--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through
+Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, "Now I will try to realize
+Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me...." Ties
+flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping
+ghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The
+long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops
+(and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential,
+semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence,
+they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up
+every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and
+further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.
+The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self,
+nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the
+long monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around
+and beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to
+pick out with one's soul from Darkness. "Here am I," I said as the
+roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed
+through the blackness. "Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of
+glimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my
+feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through
+deserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and
+hold me."
+
+No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea
+and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but
+it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of
+appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High
+Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my
+own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying
+that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or
+horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain
+may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must
+confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's
+immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in
+his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is
+his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and
+his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the
+space there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is
+living or staying, the universe is his real address.
+
+I have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide night
+and looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the
+swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my
+board in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered
+it in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of
+it--the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through me
+and chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, "Where art thou?" I
+looked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself and
+upon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters.
+
+  A thousand breaths we lie
+  Shrouded limbs and faces
+  Horizontal
+  Packed in cases
+  In our named and numbered places,
+  Catalogued for sleep,
+  Trembling through the Godlight
+  Below, above,
+  Deep to Deep.
+
+How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to
+have time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about
+another--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if
+it were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters out
+for having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--is
+a problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a
+grave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in
+another world would ever really pay some people for the time they have
+wasted in this one, worrying about it.
+
+Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as
+unimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I am
+a parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist of
+worlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am
+not living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe
+... with a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. The
+whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it.
+I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--to
+the uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit,
+would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night
+they reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with
+dreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at
+least as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I
+care little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across
+my soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other
+when I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related
+life, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or
+not,--takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of
+space or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and
+petering along over a long, narrow row of years?
+
+Thousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, and
+through the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked and
+printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not
+know that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam
+I say, "There is my omnipresence." My being is busy out in the
+universe having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the
+world are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to
+keep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I
+lay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether
+I so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof
+for me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.
+
+
+II
+
+I have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea of
+which seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who are
+worthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fashioned
+method that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practical
+purposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us,--are
+already being woven in us. The author does not say it in so many
+words, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual or
+subtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we live
+as we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one.
+
+I can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to take
+the time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infinite
+experiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about another
+world.
+
+It is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in an
+infinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managed
+than one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do,
+is to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this.
+If the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one,
+then so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems a
+little abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and why
+not leave it to God to work it out? He doesn't have to neglect
+anything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do it
+anyway.
+
+I have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of a
+theory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly
+still. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me,
+through all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deep
+grass. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city in
+the grass--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. I
+know their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. And
+when I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds,
+tides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possess
+them. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions of
+ages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sun
+and the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Who
+can shut me out from anybody's sunrise?
+
+  "Oh, tenderly the haughty day
+  Fills his blue urn with fire;
+  One morn is in the mighty heaven
+  And one in my desire."
+
+I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I can
+telegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is no
+longer a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, conducting a big
+foolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helpless
+cities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it out
+from over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is my
+sky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has a
+monopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I have
+made an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky.
+The soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares.
+Men go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift my
+hands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the hands
+of my hands I work with it. I say "I and the sky." I say "I and the
+Earth." We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached over
+with the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--a
+kind of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfully
+out in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one of
+his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborly
+thought. God's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man have
+signaled each other.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE IDEA OF GOD
+
+
+My study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where I
+put it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of
+it--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand
+guard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;
+nearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down
+in my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming
+gently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I would
+not believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in which Bottle?" I have groped
+for one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping
+for a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of
+ancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events
+of the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed
+on the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make
+out to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can.
+
+I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that
+when the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in
+my mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things,
+pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow
+and reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells me
+cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he
+has found Him, I wonder if he has.
+
+The very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a world
+alive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey
+to search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would find
+would be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his
+God in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.
+
+It does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain,
+rudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the very
+essence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for,
+in giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences.
+I suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with the
+scientist is not that he is material, but that he is not material
+enough,--he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot
+believe for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacle
+of matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed
+thing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--this
+spectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in a
+bottle for instance--a bottle which he places absolutely by itself,
+would be able to find one if he tried. It seems to me that it is by
+letting one's self have one's infinite--one's infinitely related
+experiences, and not by cutting them off that one comes to know a God.
+To find a God who is everywhere one must at least spend a part of
+one's time in being everywhere one's self--in relating one's knowledge
+to all knowledge.
+
+There are various undergirding arguments and reasons, but the only way
+that I really know there is an infinite God is because I am
+infinite--in a small way--myself. Even the matter that has come into
+the world connected with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. If
+my soul, like some dim pale light left burning within me, were merely
+to creep to the boundaries of its own body, it would know there was a
+God. The very flesh I live with every day is infinite flesh. From the
+furthest rumors of men and women, the furthest edge of time and space
+my soul has gathered dust to itself. I carry a temple about with me.
+If I could do no better, and if there were need, I am my own
+cathedral. I worship when I breathe. I bow down before the tick of my
+pulse. I chant to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of my
+fingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man ask
+me to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go
+out into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure there
+is a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the
+God within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of the
+burning dust warmed me before the stars--made a hearth for my soul
+before them? I am at home with them. I sit daily before worlds as at
+my own fireside.
+
+I suppose there is something intolerant and impatient and a little
+heartless about an optimist--especially the kind of optimism that is
+based upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the structure of the
+world. There is such a thing, I suppose, with some of us, as having a
+kind of devilish pride in faith, as one would say to ordinary mortals
+and creepers and considerers and arguers "Oh now just see me believe!"
+We are like boys taking turns jumping in the Great Vacant Lot, seeing
+which can believe the furthest. We need to be reminded that a man
+cannot simply bring a little brag to God, about His world, and make a
+religion out of it. I do not doubt in the least, as a matter of
+theory, that I have the wrong spirit--sometimes--toward the scientific
+man who lives around the corner of my mind. It seems to me he is
+always suggesting important-looking unimportant things. I have days of
+sympathizing with him, of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack
+up upon my shoulders and strapping it there. But before I know it I'm
+off. I throw it away or melt it down into a tablet or something--put
+it in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God.
+
+And the worst of it is, I think He intended me to. I think He intended
+me to know and to keep knowing daily what He has done for me and is
+doing now, out in the universe, and what He has made me to do. I also
+am a God. From the first time I saw the sun I have been one daily. I
+have performed daily all the homelier miracles and all the common
+functions of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into my being. Out
+of the air of heaven I have made flesh. I have taken earth from the
+earth and burned it within me and made it into prayers and into songs.
+I have said to my soul "To eat is to sing." I worship all over. I am
+my own sacrament. I lay before God nights of sleep, and the delight
+and wonder of the flesh I render back to Him again, daily, as an
+offering in His sight.
+
+And what is true of my literal body--of the joy of my hands and my
+feet, is still more true of the hands of my hands.
+
+When I wake in the night and send forth my thought upon the darkness,
+track out my own infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky
+reaching around me, all telegraphed through with thought, and floored
+with steel, I may have to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes),
+but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the door of heaven if
+there is a heaven or needs to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory
+of the other worlds, has not science itself told me that they are a
+part of me and I a part of them? Nothing is that would not be
+different without something else. My thoughts are ticking through the
+clouds, and the great sun itself is creeping through me daily down in
+my bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a hundred seas. I turn
+over in my sleep at midnight and lay my hand on the noon. And when I
+have slept and walk forth in the morning, the stars flow in my veins.
+Why should a man dare to whine? "Whine not at me!" I have said to man
+my brother. If you cannot sing to me do not interrupt me.
+
+  Let him sing to me
+  Who sees the watching of the stars above the day,
+  Who hears the singing of the sunrise
+  On its way
+  Through all the night.
+  Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms,
+  Whose soul has roamed
+  Infinite-homed
+  Through tents of Space,
+  His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms
+  All wonder.
+
+  Let him sing to me
+  Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover
+  Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds
+  The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife,
+  The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds,
+  Of His Own Life.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE
+
+
+_AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN_
+
+  Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,
+  Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words
+  In the music-haunted houses of the birds,
+  Singers with the thrushes and pewees
+  In the glimmer-lighted roofs
+  Of the trees--
+  Unhand my soul!
+  Buds with singing in their hearts,
+  Birds with blooms upon their wings,
+  All the wandering whispers of delight,
+  The near familiar things;
+  Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,
+  Sounds of going in the grain
+  Shall not bind me to thy singing
+  When the sky with God is ringing
+  For the Joy of the Rain.
+  Sea and star and hill and thunder,
+  Dawn and sunset, noon and night,
+  All the vast processional of the wonder
+  Where the worlds are,
+  Where my soul is,
+  Where the shining tracks are
+  For the spirit's flight--
+  Lift thine eyes to these
+  From the haunts of dewdrops,
+  Hollows of the flowers,
+  Caves of bees
+  That sing like thee,
+  Only in their bowers;
+  From the stately growing cities
+  Of the little blowing leaves,
+  To the infinite windless eaves
+  Of the stars;
+  From the dainty music of the ground,
+  The dim innumerable sound
+  Of the Mighty Sun
+  Creeping in the grass,
+  Softest stir of His feet
+  (Where they go
+  Far and slow
+  On their immemorial beat
+  Of buds and seeds
+  And all the gentle and holy needs
+  Of flowers),
+  To the old eternal round
+  Of the Going of His Might,
+  Above the confines of the dark,
+  Odors and winds and showers,
+  Day and night,
+  Above the dream of death and birth
+  Flickering East and West,
+  Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth--
+  Where He wheels
+  And soars
+  And plays
+  In illimitable light,
+  Sends the singing stars upon their ways
+  And on each and every world
+  When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep
+  Is furled--
+  Pours the Days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric
+cars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home to
+supper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The
+Thing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been
+found by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turned
+on--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels,
+and run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out in
+the darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I
+had seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked
+on in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more
+surprised if I had met a star walking in the street.
+
+  In my deepest dream
+  I heard the Song
+  Running in my sleep
+  Through the lowest caves of Being
+  Down below
+  Where no sound is, sun is,
+  Hearing, seeing
+  That men know.
+
+There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars
+moving, that made it all seem very old.
+
+
+_An Ode to the Lightning._
+
+  Before the first new dust of dream God took
+  For making man and hope and love and graves
+  Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods
+  Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow
+  Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,
+  The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague
+  To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept
+  From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff
+  That wove the worlds,
+  Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,
+  While still, hinged on nothing,
+  Dim and shapeless Things
+  And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings
+  Floated and waited.
+  Before the winds had breathed the breath of life
+  Or blown from wastes of Space
+  To Earth's creating place,
+  The souls of seeds
+  And ghosts of old dead stars,
+  The Lightning Spirit willed
+  Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.
+  --Primal fire of all desire
+  That leaps from men to men,
+  Brother of Suns
+  And all the Glorious Ones
+  That circle skies,
+  He flashed to these
+  The night that brought the birth,
+  The vision of the place
+  And raised his awful face
+  To all their glittering crowds,
+  And cried from where It lay
+  --A tiny ball of fire and clay
+  In swaddling clothes of clouds,
+  "Behold the Earth!"
+
+         *     *     *     *     *
+         *     *     *     *     *
+
+  Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer
+  Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!
+  Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.
+  Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven
+  And heaven and Heaven's heaven.  Oh thou whose play
+  Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_)
+  --And call from holidays of space, sojourns
+  Of suns and moons, and lock to earth
+  (_Why lock to earth?_)
+
+         *     *     *     *     *
+
+  That the Dead Face may flash across the seas
+  The cry of the new-born babe be heard around
+  A world. Ah me! and the click of lust
+  And the madness and the gladness and the ache
+  Of Dust, Dust!
+
+
+AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.
+
+THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE
+
+  The mortal wires of the heart of the earth
+  I sing, melted and fused by men,
+  That the immortal fires of their souls should fling
+  To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,
+  And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense
+  The flame of the Creature's ken,
+  The flame of the glow of the face of God
+  Upon the face of men.
+
+  Wind-singing wires
+  Along their thousand airy aisles,
+  Feet of birds and songs of leaves,
+  Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.
+  Sea-singing wires
+  Along their thousand slimy miles,
+  Shadowy deeps,
+  Unsunned steeps,
+  Beating in their awful caves
+  To mouthing fish and bones
+  And weeds unfurled
+  Deserts of waves
+  The heart-beat of this upper world.
+  Infinite blue, infinite green,
+  Infinite glory of the ear
+  Ticking its passions through
+  Infinite fear,
+  Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks
+  The forever untrodden decks
+  Of Death,
+  Ever the seething wires
+  On the floors
+  Of the world,
+  Below the last
+  Locked fast
+  Water-darkened doors
+  Of the sun,
+  Lighting the awful signal fires
+  Of our speechless vast desires
+  On the mountains and the hills
+  Of the sea
+  Till the sandy-buried heights
+  And the sullen sunken vales
+  And fire-defying barrens of the deep
+  The hearth of souls shall be
+  Beacons of Thought,
+  And from the lurk of the shark
+  To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark
+  And where the farthest cloud-sail fills
+  Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping
+  The might and mad delight,
+  The hell-and-heaven groping
+  Of our little human wills.
+
+
+AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS
+
+THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH
+WOULD NOT WORK
+
+  Roofed in with fears,
+  Beneath its little strip of sky
+  That is blown about
+  In and out
+  Across my wavering strip of years--
+  Who am I
+  Whose singing scarce doth reach
+  The cloud-climbed hills,
+  To take upon my lips the speech
+  Of those whose voices Heaven fills
+  With splendor?
+
+  And yet--
+  I cannot quite forget
+  That in the underdawn of dreams
+  I have felt the faint surmise
+  Shining through the starry deep of my sleep
+  That I with God went singing once
+  Up and down with suns and storms
+  Through the phantom-pillared forms
+  And stately-silent naves
+  And thunder-dreaming caves
+  Of Heaven.
+
+  Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh
+  Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,
+  Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
+  Hast thrust
+  Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
+  Where are the deeds that needs must be,
+  The dreams, the high delights,
+  That I once more may hear my voice
+  From cloudy door to door rejoice--
+  May stretch the boundaries of love
+  Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
+  To the faint-remembered glory of those years--
+  May lift my soul
+  And reach this Heaven of thine
+  With mine?
+  Where are the gleams?
+  Thou shalt tell me,
+  Shalt compel me.
+  The sometime glory shall return
+  I know.
+
+  The day shall be
+  When by wondering I shall learn
+  With vapor-fingers to discern
+  The music-hidden keys of skies--
+  Shall touch like thee
+  Until they answer me
+  The chords of the silent air
+  And strike the wild and slumber-music out
+  Dreaming there.
+  Above the hills of singing that I know
+  On the trackless, soundless path
+  That wonder hath
+  I shall go,
+  Beyond the street-cry of the poet,
+  The hurdy-gurdy singing
+  Of the throngs,
+  To the Throne of Silence,
+  Where the Doors
+  That guard the farthest faintest shores
+  Of Day
+  Swing their bars,
+  And shut the songs of heaven in
+  From all our dreaming-doing din,
+  Behind the stars.
+
+  There, at last,
+  The climbing and the singing passed,
+  And the cry,
+  My hushed and listening soul shall lie
+  At the feet of the place
+  Where the Singer sings
+  Who Hides His Face.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN
+
+  "_I had a vision under a green hedge
+  A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear
+  Archangels rolling over the high mountains
+  Old Satan's empty skull._"
+
+
+As it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earth
+has about been put into shape, now, to do things.
+
+The Earth has never been seen before looking so trim and
+convenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and looms
+and printing presses and railways have been supplied, wireless
+telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we
+have put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it
+looks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just
+being finished up, now, for a Great Author.
+
+It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a
+prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the
+modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world
+full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the
+wrong size.
+
+The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical
+way, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its
+poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it
+is quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its
+machines and things making preparations for bigger ones.
+
+I have thought the great authors in every age were made by the
+greatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice,
+have felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes
+been called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds,
+by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him
+in His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost any
+one who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that
+Jesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have
+missed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at
+least--ideas that nations would be born for.
+
+It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the
+great prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations
+and that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the
+whole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a
+whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like
+galleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no
+particular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail
+across an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth
+in him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.
+He discovered America because he felt crowded.
+
+One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of
+immortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic
+fact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness.
+When people have to be created and born on purpose, generation after
+generation of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of
+them sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he
+spoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in
+the habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several
+centuries who gets them.
+
+I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this
+earth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and
+look expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet
+somewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to
+him. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and
+to listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks
+in it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been
+allowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could
+be said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot
+believe that a world which for the first time in its history has at
+last the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not
+going to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to
+say to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full
+audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would
+seem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half
+in light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having
+a man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back,
+either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or
+thought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this
+present world has the verse of scripture about the next come
+true--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." It is not conceivable that
+there shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to
+the first full house the planet has afforded.
+
+I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the
+peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little
+corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to
+himself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of
+years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can
+great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into
+single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a
+world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.
+The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids
+are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great
+authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be
+helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to
+say, with the first full house this planet has afforded.
+
+Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but
+speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations
+sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven
+seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the
+stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play
+following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of
+soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want
+to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction
+apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude.
+Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The
+wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet
+applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One
+would like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one
+was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space.
+
+I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or
+had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write
+in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was
+that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around
+all of us now--I do like to mention it.
+
+When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time
+to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel
+steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why
+it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and
+watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the
+foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the
+drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the
+last secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I
+have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I
+know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep
+enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and
+the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands
+of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working
+softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the
+word that was given to me to say.
+
+Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful,
+clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the
+other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and
+actions great in the world?
+
+Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great
+gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are
+unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting
+together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first
+world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really
+getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished,
+lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One
+sees the sign on it
+
+            TO LET
+  TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP
+
+  "_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me
+  Of some transcendent music I have heard;
+  No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,
+  No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.
+  But a glad strain of some still symphony
+  That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._"
+
+
+Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle
+Reader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying
+there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as
+you stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in
+your being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people
+in it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls
+say it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in
+the street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls,
+that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O to
+know--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second,
+twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to
+be sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets
+and silent houses of it!"
+
+I go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nights
+of the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, in
+The Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And I
+have said to you though I did not know it: "Did you not call to me?
+Did you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you."
+
+I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my soul.
+I have gone about and looked upon the face of the earth. I have
+demanded of smoking villages sweeping past and of the mountains and of
+the plains and of the middle of the sea: "Where are those that belong
+to me? Will I ever travel near enough, far enough?" I have gone up and
+down the world--seen the countless men and women in it, standing on
+either side of their Abyss of Circumstance, beckoning and reaching
+out. I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, or old, casting
+their bread upon the waters, grasping at sunsets or afterglows,
+putting their souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem to be
+flickering their lives out like Marconi messages into a sort of
+infinite, swallowing human space.
+
+Always this same wild aimless sea of living. There does not seem to be
+a geography for love. My soul answered me: "Did you expect a world to
+be indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. Blossoms and cyclones and
+sunshine and you and I--all blundering along together." "Let every
+seed swell for itself," the Universe has said, in its first fine
+careless rapture. God is merely having a good time. Why should I go up
+and down a universe crying through it, "Where are those that belong to
+me?" I have looked at the stars swung out at me and they have not
+answered, and now when I look at the men, I have seemed to see them,
+every man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands before him,
+hinged on emptiness. "You are alone," the heart hath said. "Get up and
+be your own brother. The world is a great WHO CARES?"
+
+But when, in the middle of deep, helpless sleep, tossed on the wide
+waters, I wake in a ship, feel it trembling all through out there with
+my brother's care for me, I know that this is not true. "Around
+sunsets, out through the great dark," I find myself saying, "he has
+reached over and held me. Out here on this high hill of water, under
+this low, touching sky, I sleep."
+
+Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake silently, and feel gathered
+around. I wonder if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the button
+by my pillow. I listen to great cities tending me. I have found all
+the earth paved, or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with my
+brother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide from love. He has hired
+oceans to do my errands. He has made the whole human race my
+house-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer joy, thinking of the
+strange peoples where the morning is, running to and fro for me, down
+under the dark. Next me, the great quiet throb of the engine--between
+me and infinite space--beating comfortably. I cannot help answering to
+it--this soft and mighty reaching out where I lie.
+
+My thoughts follow along the great twin shafts my brother holds me
+with. I wonder about them. I wish to do and share with them.
+
+  Were I a spirit I would go
+  Where the murmuring axles of the screws
+  Along their whirling aisles
+  Break through the hold,
+  Where they lift the awful shining thews
+  Of Thought,
+  Of Trade,
+  And strike the Sea
+  Till the scar of London lies
+  Miles and miles upon its breast
+  Out in the West.
+
+As I lie and look out of my port-hole and watch the starlight stepping
+along the sea I let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship I am
+in--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through my
+port-hole I seem to see other ships, ghosts of great cities--an ocean
+of them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, with
+their low hoarse whistles meeting one another, whispering to one
+another under the stars.
+
+"And they are all mine," I say, "hastening gently."
+
+I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole being float out upon the
+thought of it. The bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived a
+great life. It is as if I had been allowed to be a great man a minute.
+I feel rested down through to before I was born. The very stars, after
+it, seem rested over my head. I have gathered my universe about me. It
+is as if I had lain all still in my soul and some beautiful eternal
+sleep--a minute of it--had come to me and visited me. All men are my
+brothers. Is not the world filled with hastening to me? What is there
+my brother has not done for me? From the uttermost parts of the
+morning, all things that are flow fresh and beautiful upon my flesh.
+He has laid my will on the heavens. His machines are like the tides
+that do not stop. They are a part of the vast antennę of the earth.
+They have grown themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and dust, they
+are a part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek furs
+Alaska is as near as the next snowdrift. My brother has caused it to
+be so. Everywhere is five cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon
+from Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knife
+from India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas.
+Thousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my mouth, five or
+six continents have made for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip
+of my tongue.
+
+And this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me,
+solitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to take
+it in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one say
+this thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done for
+comradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it or
+desired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? This
+paper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him for
+it? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of a
+great roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand he
+has held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--of
+clouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea.
+
+And now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smoke
+forever.
+
+I have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some
+vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this
+whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in
+silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in
+my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.
+
+When I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunny
+silence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go by
+putting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer as
+it was at first, a mere train by itself to me,--a flash of parlor cars
+between a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings up
+between my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, it
+is the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creeping
+through the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring through
+the sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world.
+
+In the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it would
+be hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share in
+spirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseen
+peoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen,
+and poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets and
+the domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always the
+engineers,--I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world in
+their hands, who sweep up life ... long, narrow, little towns of
+souls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights.
+
+In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would rather
+be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I
+hear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, the
+great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the
+thunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there on
+the roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, past
+glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him
+(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on the
+switch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth and
+sky.... The cities swoon before him ... swoon past him. Thundering
+past his own thunder, echoes dying away ... and now out in the great
+plain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, little
+black miles.... Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder,
+thinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughs
+bitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men with
+tickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) he
+is not infallible. Once ... twice ... he might have ... he almost....
+Then suddenly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his teeth, he reaches
+out with his soul ... masters it, he strains himself up to his
+infallibility again ... all those people there ... fathers, mothers,
+children, ... sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as the
+minister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on a
+Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God
+... alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads.
+
+But I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can see
+at a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)
+which make the big companions. It is a mere matter of getting
+acquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woven
+through with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors.
+
+I have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spirits
+of the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer with
+us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked in
+cemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them with
+mighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence,
+walk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in show
+windows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into
+them. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little
+last whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre of
+soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the
+trees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a
+machine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not
+full of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea,
+after a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives were
+like. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about each
+other.
+
+There are days when it has been given to me to see the machines as
+inventors and prophets see them.
+
+On these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. I
+have seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the future
+through their fingers.
+
+On these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoples
+singing in the streets.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I have
+come to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily
+joy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking around
+one, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all this
+vast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and sounds
+and symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere,
+playing upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well,
+when in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in order
+around about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived.
+
+This great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before,
+always sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive
+energy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see the
+look of the future in its face.
+
+And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live
+forever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant
+gesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now,
+solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh,
+unknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn
+curtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence
+and darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding,
+forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And
+then with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and
+wonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside
+living his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep.
+
+
+
+
+BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient
+rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies
+and songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century.
+"If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill."
+
+II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven
+to his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are
+getting their living out of machines, or putting their living into
+them, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down
+under the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves
+him standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except
+by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of
+communing with his kind.
+
+III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul
+or the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little
+while--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A
+little while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to
+feel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems
+at first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in
+machines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the
+machine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame
+that minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a
+machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be
+anything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas.
+All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take
+the stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be
+connected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued
+existence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for
+modern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the
+crowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,
+and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.
+
+IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary men
+who know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them,
+the inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about the
+poetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of
+interpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead of
+being a literary or ęsthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting
+people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.
+
+VI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of the
+people, the tools of the nations.
+
+The people are already coming to look upon the inventor under our
+modern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we call
+literature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing their
+living with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as men
+are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems the
+world listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpret
+machines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership until
+it does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in an
+age, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in a
+machine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, is
+not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of the
+machines that we have made could make a better religion than this.
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
+
+I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must
+have great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that the
+language of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideas
+that are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all language
+looked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, is
+irrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of
+an archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people who
+have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a form
+of human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings.
+
+II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of
+everything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show
+off. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not
+feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it,
+is not seeing it. The poetry is under water.
+
+III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for
+poetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for
+old-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch
+windmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern
+man. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its
+language is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in
+proportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modern
+language, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machines
+the more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric.
+Electricity is the modern man's prophet. It sums up his world. It has
+the modern man's temperament--the passion of being invisible and
+irresistible.
+
+IV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of God.
+Most men to-day are worshipping God--at least in secret, not merely
+because of this great Machine that He has made, running softly above
+us--moonlight and starlight ... but because He has made a Machine that
+can make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of the
+earth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron and
+say "Go ye now,--depths of the earth, heights of heaven--serve ye me!
+Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the spirit that is in
+thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!"
+
+V. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thing
+means, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning the
+language. The language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely
+know whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I only
+know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of
+the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my
+soul to it, and in some way--I know not how, while it sings to me, I
+grow strong and glad.
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE MACHINES AS POETS
+
+I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul of
+man--of a whole world of men.
+
+It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of the
+individual man who creates the Machine--the inventor, and the man who
+lives with the machine--the engineer.
+
+It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of God
+who can make men who can make machines.
+
+III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man's
+soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have--the
+man's sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not
+merely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it is
+making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear the
+machines, I hear Man saying, "God and I."
+
+V. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the infinity of
+man it expresses the two great immeasurable ideas of poetry and of the
+imagination and of the soul in all ages--the two forms of
+infinity--the liberty and the unity of man.
+
+The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.
+
+A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the
+nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.
+
+Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately
+expressed.
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+The ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched in
+chapters as follows:
+
+I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man.
+
+III. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment.
+
+IV. The idea of immortality.
+
+V. The idea of God.
+
+VI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible.
+
+VII. The practical idea of invoking great men.
+
+VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Note.--The present volume is the first of a series which had their
+beginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago,
+answering or trying to answer the question, "Can a machine age have a
+soul?" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as it
+stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phases
+and implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in our
+modern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, are
+being considered in a series of three volumes called:
+
+I. The Voice of the Machines.
+
+II. Machines and Millionaires.
+
+III. Machines and Crowds.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. _$1.00._ "I have read it twice and
+enjoyed it the second time even more than the first."--_Oliver Wendell
+Holmes._
+
+"I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made me
+as hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of
+laughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I
+do not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as I
+would a note--right across the face and present it for payment in any
+man's library."--_Robert J. Burdette._
+
+
+THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. _$.75._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) "I must
+express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm I have
+felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most
+brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were
+laid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form,
+and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely
+a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive....
+
+"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It
+is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes
+me believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in
+authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can
+conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the
+date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long
+been scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY, in _Boston
+Transcript_.
+
+
+THE LOST ART OF READING. _$1.00._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) "It is a
+real pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books of
+the day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us having
+read it will keep it near us."--_Life_.
+
+"Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what some
+people are a little alarmed even to think."--_Springfield Republican_.
+
+"You get right in between the covers and live."--_Denver Post_.
+
+
+THE SHADOW CHRIST. _$1.25._ (_The Century Co._) "Let me be one of the
+first to recognize in this book what every man who reads it
+thoughtfully will feel. Heaps of the books that have been written
+about the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust. They
+are the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a man appears
+who makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if
+necessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be a full,
+precise treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision.
+Theology expressed in a lyric. Criticism condensed into an
+epigram."--DR. HENRY VAN DYKE, in _The Book Buyer_.
+
+"The author's name--Gerald Stanley Lee--has been hitherto unknown to
+us in England, but the book he has here offered to the world indicates
+that he has that in him which will soon make it familiar."--_The
+Christian World_ (London).
+
+
+MOUNT TOM. AN ALL OUTDOORS MAGAZINE, devoted to rest and worship, and
+to a little look-off on the world.
+
+Edited by Mr. LEE. Every other month. 12 copies, $1.00.
+
+
+THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. _$1.25._ (_Mt. Tom Press._)
+
+
+  Any of the above mailed postpaid ordered direct from
+       The Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Mass.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by Gerald Stanley Lee
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+
+Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by 
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voice of the Machines
+       An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
+
+Author: Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+Release Date: January 15, 2007 [EBook #20361]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lee Spector and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div id="front_matter">
+	<div id="title_page">
+		<h1 class="title">The Voice of the Machines</h1>
+		<p class="subtitle">An Introduction to the Twentieth Century</p>
+		<p class="stopword">BY</p>
+		<p class="author">Gerald Stanley Lee</p>
+		<div id="pub_info">
+			<p class="publisher">The Mount Tom Press</p>
+			<p class="pub_location">Northampton, Massachusetts</p>
+		</div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="copyright_page">
+		<p class="rights_statement">Copyright, 1906<br />
+			by<br />
+			THE MOUNT TOM PRESS</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="dedication_page">
+		<p class="dedicatee">TO JENNETTE LEE</p>
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>&#8230; &#8220;Now and then my fancy caught</p>
+				<p>A flying glimpse of a good life beyond&#8212;</p>
+				<p>Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing,</p>
+				<p>Troy falling, and the ages coming back,</p>
+				<p>And ages coming forward.&#8221;&#8230;</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="contents">
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="pageiii" name="pageiii"></a>iii</span></p>
+		<h2>Contents</h2>
+		<p class="content_part">PART I</p>
+		<p class="content_part_title">THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES</p>
+		<ol>
+			<li><a href="#part_1_ch_1">Machines as Seen from a Meadow</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_1_ch_2">As Seen through a Hatchway</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_1_ch_3">The Souls of Machines</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_1_ch_4">Poets</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_1_ch_5">Gentlemen</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_1_ch_6">Prophets</a></li>
+		</ol>
+		<p class="content_part">PART II</p>
+		<p class="content_part_title">THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES</p>
+		<ol>
+			<li><a href="#part_2_ch_1">As Good as Ours</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_2_ch_2">On Being Busy and Still</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_2_ch_3">On Not Showing Off</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_2_ch_4">On Making People Proud of the World</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_2_ch_5">A Modest Universe</a></li>
+		</ol>
+		<p class="content_part"><span class="pagenum"><a id="pageiv" name="pageiv"></a>iv</span>PART III</p>
+		<p class="content_part_title">THE MACHINES AS POETS</p>
+		<ol>
+			<li><a href="#part_3_ch_1">Plato and the General Electric Works</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_3_ch_2">Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_3_ch_3">The Grudge against the Infinite</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_3_ch_4">Symbolism in Modern Art</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_3_ch_5">The Machines as Artists</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_3_ch_6">The Machines as Philosophers</a></li>
+		</ol>
+		<p class="content_part">PART IV</p>
+		<p class="content_part_title">THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES</p>
+		<ol>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_1">The Idea of Incarnation</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_2">The Idea of Size</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_3">The Idea of Liberty</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_4">The Idea of Immortality</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_5">The Idea of God</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_6">The Idea of the Unseen and the Intangible</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_7">The Idea of Great Men</a></li>
+			<li><a href="#part_4_ch_8">The Idea of Love and Comradeship</a></li>
+		</ol>
+	</div>
+</div>
+
+<div id="Part_I" class="part">
+	<p class="part_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page1" name="page1"></a>1</span>PART ONE</p>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page2" name="page2"></a>2</span></p>
+	<h2 class="part_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page3" name="page3"></a>3</span>THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES</h2>
+	<div id="part_1_ch_1" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number">I</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">MACHINES. AS SEEN FROM A MEADOW</h3>
+		<p>It would be difficult to find anything in
+		the encyclopedia that would justify the
+		claim that we are about to make, or anything
+		in the dictionary. Even a poem&#8212;which is
+		supposed to prove anything with a little of
+		nothing&#8212;could hardly be found to prove it;
+		but in this beginning hour of the twentieth
+		century there are not a few of us&#8212;for the time
+		at least allowed to exist upon the earth&#8212;who
+		are obliged to say (with Luther), &#8220;Though
+		every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, we cannot
+		say otherwise&#8212;the locomotive is beautiful.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>As seen when one is looking at it as it is, and
+		is not merely using it.</p>
+
+		<p>As seen from a meadow.</p>
+
+		<p>We had never thought to fall so low as this,
+		or that the time would come when we would
+		feel moved&#8212;all but compelled, in fact&#8212;to betray
+		to a cold and discriminating world our poor,
+		pitiful, one-adjective state.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page4" name="page4"></a>4</span>We do not know why a locomotive is beautiful.
+		We are perfectly aware that it ought not
+		to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for
+		being beautiful&#8212;and of ourselves. We have
+		attempted all possible words upon it&#8212;the most
+		complimentary and worthy ones we know&#8212;words
+		with the finer resonance in them, and the
+		air of discrimination the soul loves. We cannot
+		but say that several of these words from time
+		to time have seemed almost satisfactory to our
+		ears. They seem satisfactory also for general
+		use in talking with people, and for introducing
+		locomotives in conversation; but the next time
+		we see a locomotive coming down the track,
+		there is no help for us. We quail before the
+		headlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as
+		the voice of the hurrying people. Our little
+		row of adjectives is vanished. All adjectives
+		are vanished. They are as one.</p>
+
+		<p>Unless the word &#8220;beautiful&#8221; is big enough to
+		make room for a glorious, imperious, world-possessing,
+		world-commanding beauty like this,
+		we are no longer its disciples. It is become a
+		play word. It lags behind truth. Let it be
+		shut in with its rim of hills&#8212;the word beautiful&#8212;its
+		show of sunsets and its bouquets and
+		its doilies and its songs of birds. We are seekers
+		for a new word. It is the first hour of the
+		twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so
+		is the locomotive that conquers a hill. So is the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page5" name="page5"></a>5</span>telephone, piercing a thousand sunsets north
+		to south, with the sound of a voice. The night
+		is not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over
+		the city, than the electric spark pushing the
+		night one side, that the city may behold itself;
+		and the hour is at hand&#8212;is even now upon us&#8212;when
+		not the sun itself shall be more beautiful
+		to men than the telegraph stopping the sun in
+		the midst of its high heaven, and holding it
+		there, while the will of a child to another child
+		ticks round the earth. &#8220;Time shall be folded
+		up as a scroll,&#8221; saith the voice of Man, my
+		Brother. &#8220;The spaces between the hills, to
+		ME,&#8221; saith the Voice, &#8220;shall be as though they
+		were not.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.</p>
+
+		<p>It is the voice of the machines.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_1_ch_2" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page6" name="page6"></a>6</span>II</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY</h3>
+		<p>In its present importance as a factor in life
+		and a modifier of its conditions, the machine
+		is in every sense a new and unprecedented fact.
+		The machine has no traditions. The only way
+		to take a traditional stand with regard to life
+		or the representation of life to-day, is to leave
+		the machine out. It has always been left out.
+		Leaving it out has made little difference. Only
+		a small portion of the people of the world have
+		had to be left out with it.</p>
+
+		<p>Not to see poetry in the machinery of this
+		present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the
+		age. It is not to believe in the age.</p>
+
+		<p>The first fact a man encounters in this modern
+		world, after his mother&#8217;s face, is the machine.
+		The moment be begins to think outwards, he
+		thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in
+		was sawed and planed by a machine, or cast in a
+		foundry. The windows he looks out of were
+		built in mills. His knife and fork were made
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page7" name="page7"></a>7</span>by steam. His food has come through rollers
+		and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to
+		him by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a
+		factory and the cloth of the clothes he wears
+		was flashed together by looms.</p>
+
+		<p>The machine does not end here. When he
+		grows to years of discretion and looks about him
+		to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that
+		that place must come to him out of a machine.
+		By the side of a machine of one sort or another,
+		whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of
+		human beings&#8217; souls, he must find his place in
+		the great whirling system of the order of mortal
+		lives, and somewhere in the system&#8212;that is,
+		the Machine&#8212;be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt,
+		or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him
+		to be from the beginning of the world.</p>
+
+		<p>The moment he begins to think, a human
+		being finds himself facing a huge, silent, blue-and-gold
+		something called the universe, the
+		main fact of which must be to him that it seems
+		to go without him very well, and that he must
+		drop into the place that comes, whatever it may
+		be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever
+		be left behind. He learns before many years
+		that this great machine shop of a globe, turning
+		solemnly its days and nights, where he has
+		wandered for a life, will hardly be inclined to
+		stop&#8212;to wait perchance&#8212;to ask him what he
+		wants to be, or how this life of his shall get
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page8" name="page8"></a>8</span>itself said. He looks into the Face of Circumstance.
+		(Sometimes it is the Fist of
+		Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a
+		silent face. It points to the machine. He
+		looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying
+		past him night and day,&#8212;miles of streets of
+		them. They, too, have looked into the Face of
+		Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine.
+		They show it in their faces. Some of them
+		show it in their gait. The Machine closes
+		around him, with its vast insistent murmur,
+		million-peopled and full of laughs and cries.
+		He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.</p>
+
+		<p>He listens to the Machine&#8217;s prophet. &#8220;All
+		men,&#8221; says Political Economy, &#8220;may be roughly
+		divided as attaching themselves to one or the
+		other of three great classes of activity&#8212;production,
+		consumption or distribution.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>The number of persons who are engaged in
+		production outside of association with machinery,
+		if they could be gathered together in
+		one place, would be an exceedingly small and
+		strange and uncanny band of human beings.
+		They would be visited by all the world as
+		curiosities.</p>
+
+		<p>The number of persons who are engaged in
+		distribution outside of association with machinery
+		is equally insignificant. Except for a
+		few peddlers, distribution is hardly anything
+		else but machinery.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page9" name="page9"></a>9</span>The number of persons who are engaged in
+		consumption outside of association with machinery
+		is equally insignificant. So far as consumption
+		is concerned, any passing freight train,
+		if it could be stopped and examined on its way
+		to New York, would be found to be loaded with
+		commodities, the most important part of which,
+		from the coal up, have been produced by one
+		set of machines to be consumed by another set
+		of machines.</p>
+
+		<p>So omnipresent and masterful and intimate
+		with all existence have cogs and wheels and
+		belts become, that not a civilized man could be
+		found on the globe to-day, who, if all the
+		machines that have helped him to live this
+		single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled
+		around him where he stands, would be able, for
+		the machines piled high around his life, to see
+		the sky&#8212;to be sure there was a sky. It is then
+		his privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel
+		and iron and running belts, to read in a paper
+		book the literary definition of what this heaven
+		is, that spreads itself above him, and above
+		the world, walled in forever with its irrevocable
+		roar of wheels.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;No inspiring emotions,&#8221; says the literary
+		definition, &#8220;ideas or conceptions can possibly
+		be connected with machinery&#8212;or ever will be.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>What is to become of a world roofed in with
+		machines for the rest of its natural life, and of
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page10" name="page10"></a>10</span>the people who will have to live under the roof
+		of machines, the literary definition does not
+		say. It is not the way of literary definitions.
+		For a time at least we feel assured that we, who
+		are the makers of definitions, are poetically and
+		personally safe. Can we not live behind the
+		ramparts of our books? We take comfort with
+		the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing
+		around us. We sit by our library fires, the last
+		nook of poetry. Beside our gates the great
+		crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath
+		our windows herds of human beings, flocking
+		through the din, in the dark of the morning and
+		the dark of the night, go marching to their fate.
+		We have done what we could. Have we not
+		defined poetry? Is it nothing to have laid the
+		boundary line of beauty?&#8230; The huge,
+		hurrying, helpless world in its belts and spindles&#8212;the
+		people who are going to be obliged to live
+		in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little
+		more&#8212;all this&#8212;the great strenuous problem&#8212;the
+		defense of beauty, the saving of its past, the
+		forging of its future, the welding of it with life-all
+		these?&#8230; Pull down the blinds,
+		Jeems. Shut out the noises of the street. A
+		little longer &#8230; the low singing to ourselves.
+		Then darkness. The wheels and the
+		din above our graves shall be as the passing of
+		silence.</p>
+
+		<p>Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page11" name="page11"></a>11</span>wants the society of his kind, he will have to
+		look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he
+		wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it
+		and look away? I do not know. I only know
+		how it is now.</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>They stay not in their hold</p>
+				<p>These stokers,</p>
+				<p>Stooping to hell</p>
+				<p>To feed a ship.</p>
+				<p>Below the ocean floors,</p>
+				<p>Before their awful doors</p>
+				<p>Bathed in flame,</p>
+				<p>I hear their human lives</p>
+				<p>Drip&#8212;drip.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Through the lolling aisles of comrades</p>
+				<p>In and out of sleep,</p>
+				<p>Troops of faces</p>
+				<p>To and fro of happy feet,</p>
+				<p>They haunt my eyes.</p>
+				<p>Their murky faces beckon me</p>
+				<p>From the spaces of the coolness of the sea</p>
+				<p>Their fitful bodies away against the skies.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_1_ch_3" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page12" name="page12"></a>12</span>III</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">SOULS OF MACHINES</h3>
+		<p>It does not make very much difference to the
+		machines whether there is poetry in them or
+		not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.</p>
+
+		<p>It is not an abstract question to the people who
+		are under the machines. Men who are under
+		things want to know what the things are for,
+		and they want to know what they are under
+		them for. It is a very live, concrete, practical
+		question whether there is, or can be, poetry in
+		machinery or not. The fate of society turns
+		upon it.</p>
+
+		<p>There seems to be nothing that men can care
+		for, whether in this world or the next, or that
+		they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is
+		not bound up, in our modern age, with machinery.
+		With the fate of machinery it stands
+		or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the
+		characteristic vital power and spirit of the modern
+		age is organization, and it cannot organize
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page13" name="page13"></a>13</span>in its religion, there is little to be hoped for in
+		religion. Modern education is a machine. If
+		the principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently
+		uninspired principle&#8212;if because a
+		machine is a machine no great meaning can be
+		expressed by it, and no great result accomplished
+		by it&#8212;there is little to be hoped for in
+		modern education.</p>
+
+		<p>Modern government is a machine. The more
+		modern a government is, the more the machine
+		in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine.
+		It is made up of (1) corporations&#8212;huge machines
+		employing machines, and (2) of trusts&#8212;huge
+		machines that control machines that employ
+		machines. Modern charity is a machine for
+		getting people to help each other. Modern
+		society is a machine for getting them to enjoy
+		each other. Modern literature is a machine for
+		supplying ideas. Modern journalism is a machine
+		for distributing them; and modern art is
+		a machine for supplying the few, very few,
+		things that are left that other machines cannot
+		supply.</p>
+
+		<p>Both in its best and worst features the characteristic,
+		inevitable thing that looms up in
+		modern life over us and around us, for better or
+		worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry
+		at it, or not. It makes little difference to the
+		machine. We may not see what it is for. It
+		has come to stay. It is going to stay until we
+		do see what it is for. We cannot move it. We
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page14" name="page14"></a>14</span>cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it.
+		We are born in the machine. A man cannot
+		move the place he is born in. We breathe the
+		machine. A man cannot go around what he
+		breathes, any more than he can go around himself.
+		He cannot destroy what he breathes, even
+		by destroying himself. If there cannot be
+		poetry in machinery&#8212;that is if there is no
+		beautiful and glorious interpretation of machinery
+		for our modern life&#8212;there cannot be
+		poetry in anything in modern life. Either the
+		machine is the door of the future, or it stands
+		and mocks at us where the door ought to be.
+		If we who have made machines cannot make our
+		machines mean something, we ourselves are
+		meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine
+		above our lives is meaningless, the winds that
+		blow down upon us from it are empty winds,
+		and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of
+		darkness. There is one question that confronts
+		and undergirds our whole modern civilization.
+		All other questions are a part of it. Can a
+		Machine Age have a soul?</p>
+
+		<p>If we can find a great hope and a great meaning
+		for the machine-idea in its simplest form,
+		for machinery itself&#8212;that is, the machines of
+		steel and flame that minister to us&#8212;it will be
+		possible to find a great hope for our other
+		machines. If we cannot use the machines we
+		have already mastered to hope with, the less
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page15" name="page15"></a>15</span>we hope from our other machines&#8212;our spirit-machines,
+		the machines we have not mastered&#8212;the
+		better. In taking the stand that there is
+		poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas and
+		emotions can be and will be connected with
+		machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued
+		existence of modern religion&#8212;(in all
+		reverence) the God-machine; for modern education&#8212;the
+		man-machine; for modern government&#8212;the
+		crowd-machine; for modern art&#8212;the
+		machine in which the crowd lives.</p>
+
+		<p>If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a
+		machine simply because it is a machine, there
+		is not going to be anything left in this modern
+		world to connect inspiring ideas with.</p>
+
+		<p>Johnstown haunts me&#8212;the very memory of
+		it. Flame and vapor and shadow&#8212;like some
+		huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly
+		and looks at me. I suppose, to some it is
+		but a wraith of rusty vapor, a mist of old
+		iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a
+		train sweeps past. But to me, with its spires
+		of smoke and its towers of fire, it is as if a great
+		door had been opened and I had watched a
+		god, down in the wonder of real things&#8212;in the
+		act of making an earth. I am filled with childhood&#8212;and
+		a kind of strange, happy terror. I
+		struggle to wonder my way out. Thousands of
+		railways&#8212;after this&#8212;bind Johnstown to me;
+		miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets&#8212;the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page16" name="page16"></a>16</span>whole world lifting itself mightily up, rolling
+		itself along, turning itself over on a great steel
+		pivot, down in Pennsylvania&#8212;for its days and
+		nights. I am whirled away from it as from a
+		vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting
+		their souls up in a great flame and laying down
+		floors on a star. I have stood and watched, in
+		the melting-down place, the making and the
+		welding place of the bones of the world.</p>
+
+		<p>It is the object of this present writing to
+		search out a world&#8212;a world a man can live in.
+		If he cannot live in this one, let him know it
+		and make one. If he can, let him face it. If
+		the word YES cannot be written across the
+		world once more&#8212;written across this year of
+		the world in the roar of its vast machines&#8212;we
+		want to know it. We cannot quite see the
+		word YES&#8212;sometimes, huddled behind our
+		machines. But we hear it sometimes. We
+		know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the
+		machines themselves.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_1_ch_4" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page17" name="page17"></a>17</span>IV</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">POETS</h3>
+		<p>When, standing in the midst of the huge
+		machine-shop of our modern life, we are
+		informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery&#8212;the
+		thing we do our living with&#8212;is
+		inevitably connected with ideas practical and
+		utilitarian&#8212;at best intellectual&#8212;that &#8220;it will
+		always be practically impossible to make poetry
+		out of it, to make it appeal to the imagination,&#8221;
+		we refer the question to the real world, to the
+		real spirit we know exists in the real world.</p>
+
+		<p>Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth
+		century.</p>
+
+		<p>Expectancy, which was the property of poets
+		in the centuries that are now gone by, is the
+		property to-day of all who are born upon the
+		earth.</p>
+
+		<p>The man who is not able to draw a distinction
+		between the works of John Milton and the plays
+		of Shakespeare, but who expects something of
+		the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page18" name="page18"></a>18</span>poet than any writer of verses can ever expect
+		to be who does not expect anything of this
+		same age he lives in&#8212;not even verses. Expectancy
+		is the practice of poetry. It is poetry
+		caught in the act. Though the whole world be
+		lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath
+		that poetry is dead, this same world is living in
+		the presence of more poetry, and more kinds
+		of poetry, than men have known on the earth
+		before, even in the daring of their dreams.</p>
+
+		<p>Pessimism has always been either literary&#8212;the
+		result of not being in the real world enough&#8212;or
+		genuine and provincial&#8212;the result of not
+		being in enough of the real world.</p>
+
+		<p>If we look about in this present day for a
+		suitable and worthy expectancy to make an age
+		out of, or even a poem out of, where shall we
+		look for it? In the literary definition? the
+		historical argument? the minor poet?</p>
+
+		<p>The poet of the new movement shall not be
+		discovered talking with the doctors, or defining
+		art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first
+		by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see
+		him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at
+		night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and
+		humbled with labor, but with the fire from
+		the heart of the earth playing upon his face.
+		His hands&#8212;innocent of the ink of poets, of the
+		mere outsides of things&#8212;shall be beautiful with
+		the grasp of the thing called life&#8212;with the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page19" name="page19"></a>19</span>grim, silent, patient creating of life. He shall
+		be seen living with retorts around him, loomed
+		over by machines&#8212;shadowed by weariness&#8212;to
+		the men about him half comrade, half monk&#8212;going
+		in and out among them silently, with some
+		secret glory in his heart.</p>
+
+		<p>If literary men&#8212;so called&#8212;knew the men
+		who live with machines, who are putting their
+		lives into them&#8212;inventors, engineers and brakemen&#8212;as
+		well as they know Shakespeare and
+		Milton and the Club, there would be no difficulty
+		about finding a great meaning&#8212;<i>i. e.</i>, a
+		great hope or great poetry&#8212;in machinery. The
+		real problem that stands in the way of poetry in
+		machinery is not literary, nor Ʀsthetic. It is
+		sociological. It is in getting people to notice
+		that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_1_ch_5" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page20" name="page20"></a>20</span>V</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">GENTLEMEN</h3>
+		<p>The truest definition of a gentleman is that
+		he is a man who loves his work. This
+		is also the truest definition of a poet. The man
+		who loves his work is a poet because he expresses
+		delight in that work. He is a gentleman
+		because his delight in that work makes him
+		his own employer. No matter how many men
+		are over him, or how many men pay him, or
+		fail to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven
+		the one man who is master of the earth. He is
+		the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man
+		who loves his work has the single thing the world
+		affords that can make a man free, that can make
+		him his own employer, that admits him to the
+		ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich
+		enough to pay him, what a gentleman&#8217;s work
+		is worth.</p>
+
+		<p>The poets of the world are the men who pour
+		their passions into it, the men who make the
+		world over with their passions. Everything
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page21" name="page21"></a>21</span>that these men touch, as with some strange
+		and immortal joy from out of them, has the
+		thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder.
+		They cannot have it otherwise even if they
+		would. A true man is the autobiography of
+		some great delight mastering his heart for
+		him, possessing his brain, making his hands
+		beautiful.</p>
+
+		<p>Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion
+		to the number employed there are more
+		gentlemen running locomotives to-day than
+		there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as
+		we are more creative in creating machines at
+		present than we are in creating anything else
+		there are more poets in the mechanical arts
+		than there are in the fine arts; and while
+		many of the men who are engaged in the
+		machine-shops can hardly be said to be gentlemen
+		(that is, they would rather be preachers or
+		lawyers), these can be more than offset by the
+		much larger proportion of men in the fine arts,
+		who, if they were gentlemen in the truest sense,
+		would turn mechanics at once; that is, they
+		would do the thing they were born to do, and
+		they would respect that thing, and make every
+		one else respect it.</p>
+
+		<p>While the definition of a poet and a gentleman&#8212;that
+		he is a man who loves his work&#8212;might
+		appear to make a new division of society,
+		it is a division that already exists in the actual
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page22" name="page22"></a>22</span>life of the world, and constitutes the only literal
+		aristocracy the world has ever had.</p>
+
+		<p>It may be set down as a fundamental principle
+		that, no matter how prosaic a man may be,
+		or how proud he is of having been born upon this
+		planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the
+		very essence of the most hard and practical man
+		that, as regards the one uppermost thing in his
+		life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is
+		a poet in spite of himself, and whether he knows
+		it or not.</p>
+
+		<p>So long as the thing a man works with is a
+		part of an inner ideal to him, so long as he makes
+		the thing he works with express that ideal, the
+		heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty
+		and the unconquerableness of that man, and of
+		that man&#8217;s delight, shall be upon all that he
+		does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to
+		all on earth who overhear heaven.</p>
+
+		<p>Every man who loves his work, who gets his
+		work and his ideal connected, who makes his
+		work speak out the heart of him, is a poet. It
+		makes little difference what he says about it.
+		In proportion as he has power with a thing; in
+		proportion as he makes the thing&#8212;be it a bit of
+		color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word,
+		or a wheel, or a throttle&#8212;in proportion as he
+		makes the thing fulfill or express what he wants
+		it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven
+		and earth cannot make him otherwise.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page23" name="page23"></a>23</span>That the inventor is in all essential respects
+		a poet toward the machine that he has made, it
+		would be hard to deny. That, with all the
+		apparent prose that piles itself about his
+		machine, the machine is in all essential respects
+		a poem to him, who can question? Who has
+		ever known an inventor, a man with a passion
+		in his hands, without feeling toward him as he
+		feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to
+		know that men are living now under the same
+		sky with us, hundreds of them (their faces haunt
+		us on the street), who would all but die, who
+		are all but dying now, this very moment, to
+		make a machine live,&#8212;martyrs of valves and
+		wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless,
+		tireless, unconquerable men?</p>
+
+		<p>To know an inventor the moment of his
+		triumph,&#8212;the moment when, working his will
+		before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent,
+		massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the
+		gaze of men&#8217;s souls and the needs of their
+		bodies,&#8212;to know an inventor at all is to know
+		that at a moment like this a chord is touched in
+		him strange and deep, soft as from out of all
+		eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and
+		that Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon
+		his hands, standing and watching it there. It is
+		the same song that from pride to pride and joy
+		to joy has been singing through the hearts of
+		The Men Who Make, from the beginning of the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page24" name="page24"></a>24</span>world. The thing that was not, that now is,
+		after all the praying with his hands &#8230; iron
+		and wood and rivet and cog and wheel&#8212;is
+		it not more than these to him standing before it
+		there? It is the face of matter&#8212;who does
+		not know it?&#8212;answering the face of the man,
+		whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.</p>
+
+		<p>What is true of the men who make the
+		machines is equally true of the men who live with
+		them. The brakeman and the locomotive
+		engineer and the mechanical engineer and the
+		sailor all have the same spirit. Their days are
+		invested with the same dignity and aspiration,
+		the same unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness
+		in the work itself. They begin their lives
+		as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and
+		wheels, or of great waters.</p>
+
+		<p>As I stood by the track the other night,
+		Michael the switchman was holding the road
+		for the nine o&#8217;clock freight, with his faded flag,
+		and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg.
+		As it rumbled by him, headlight, clatter, and
+		smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every
+		brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air,
+		at the jolt of the switch, started, as at some
+		greeting out of the dark, and turned and gave
+		the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave
+		it. Then we watched them, Michael and I, out
+		of the roar and the hiss of their splendid cloud,
+		their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page25" name="page25"></a>25</span>flying out to the Night, until there was nothing
+		but a dull red murmur and the falling of smoke.</p>
+
+		<p>Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the
+		rails. He put up the foot that was left from
+		the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had
+		been a brakeman himself.</p>
+
+		<p>Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt,
+		in the ordinary sense, but they love a railroad
+		as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given
+		to brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the
+		world as it passes by that their ideals are
+		beautiful. They give their lives for them,&#8212;hundreds
+		of lives a year. These lives may be
+		sordid lives looked at from the outside, but
+		mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and
+		glistening lights, roar, dust, and water, and
+		death, and life,&#8212;these play their endless spell
+		upon them. They love the shining of the track.
+		It is wrought into the very fibre of their being.</p>
+
+		<p>Years pass and years, and still more years.
+		Who shall persuade the brakemen to leave the
+		track? They never leave it. I shall always see
+		them&#8212;on their flying footboards beneath the
+		sky&#8212;swaying and rocking&#8212;still swaying and
+		rocking&#8212;to Eternity.</p>
+
+		<p>They are men who live down through to the
+		spirit and the poetry of their calling. It is the
+		poetry of the calling that keeps them there.</p>
+
+		<p>Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but
+		our one peephole in the universe, that we may
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page26" name="page26"></a>26</span>see <span class="emphasized smaller_caps">IT</span> withal; but if we love it enough and stand
+		close to it enough, we breathe the secret and
+		touch in our lives the secret that throbs through
+		it all.</p>
+
+		<p>For a man to have an ideal in this world, for
+		a man to know what an ideal is, even though
+		nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and
+		a life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades
+		whirling by, this also is to have lived.</p>
+
+		<p>The fact that the railroad has the same
+		fascination for the railroad man that the sea has
+		for the sailor is not a mere item of interest pertaining
+		to human nature. It is a fact that pertains
+		to the art of the present day, and to the
+		future of its literature. It is as much a symbol
+		of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses
+		is a symbol of the art of an heroic age.</p>
+
+		<p>That it is next to impossible to get a sailor,
+		with all his hardships, to turn his back upon the
+		sea is a fact a great many thousand years old.
+		We find it accounted for not only in the observation
+		and experience of men, but in their art. It
+		was rather hard for them to do it at first (as with
+		many other things), but even the minor poets
+		have admitted the sea into poetry. The sea
+		was allowed in poetry before mountains were
+		allowed in it. It has long been an old story.
+		When the sailor has grown too stiff to climb the
+		masts he mends sails on the decks. Everybody
+		understands&#8212;even the commonest people and
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page27" name="page27"></a>27</span>the minor poets understand&#8212;why it is that a
+		sailor, when he is old and bent and obliged to be
+		a landsman to die, does something that holds
+		him close to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes
+		where he can see the sails. If he must tend
+		flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and
+		when he selects a place for his grave, it is where
+		surges shall be heard at night singing to his
+		bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.
+		There is not a passenger on the Empire State
+		Express, this moment, being whirled to the West,
+		who could not write a sonnet on it,&#8212;not a man
+		of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying
+		through space behind the set and splendid
+		hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and write
+		a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A
+		crowd on the street could write a poem on
+		a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he
+		was dead), and now that sailors enough have
+		died in the course of time to bring the feeling of
+		the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still
+		alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen
+		how many wrecks it is going to take, lists of
+		killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns
+		of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate
+		the spiritual safe where poets are keeping their
+		souls to-day, untouched of the world, and bring
+		home to them some sense of the adventure and
+		quiet splendor and unparalleled expressiveness
+		of the engineer&#8217;s life. He is a man who would
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page28" name="page28"></a>28</span>rather be without a life (so long as he has his
+		nerve) than to have to live one without an
+		engine, and when he climbs down from the old
+		girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is
+		to linger where she is. He watches the track as
+		a sailor watches the sea. He spends his old age
+		in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in
+		and out, one always sees him sitting in the sun
+		there until he dies, and talking with them.
+		Nothing can take him away.</p>
+
+		<p>Does any one know an engineer who has not
+		all but a personal affection for his engine, who
+		has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her
+		breath with his will does not put his hand upon
+		the throttle of that ideal and make that ideal say
+		something? Woe to the poet who shall seek to
+		define down or to sing away that ideal. In its
+		glory, in darkness or in day, we are hid from
+		death. It is the protection of life. The engineer
+		who is not expressing his whole soul in
+		his engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him,
+		is not worthy to place his hand upon an engine&#8217;s
+		throttle. Indeed, who is he&#8212;this man&#8212;that
+		this awful privilege should be allowed to him,
+		that he should dare to touch the motor nerve
+		of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour
+		muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a
+		man like this, climbing the hills for him, circling
+		the globe for him? It is impossible to believe
+		that an engineer&#8212;a man who with a single touch
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page29" name="page29"></a>29</span>sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as
+		an empty wind can go, or as a pigeon swings her
+		wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the west&#8212;does
+		not mean something by it, does not love to do it
+		because he means something by it. If ever
+		there was a poet, the engineer is a poet. In his
+		dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,
+		hastener of men from the ends of the
+		earth that they may be as one, I always see him,&#8212;ceaseless&#8212;tireless&#8212;flying
+		past sleep&#8212;out
+		through the Night&#8212;thundering down the edge
+		of the world, into the Dawn.</p>
+
+		<p>Who am I that it should be given to me to
+		make a word on my lips to speak, or to make a
+		thing that shall be beautiful with my hands&#8212;that
+		I should stand by my brother&#8217;s life and gaze
+		on his trembling track&#8212;and not feel what the
+		engine says as it plunges past, about the man in
+		the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless
+		man, that he wears not his heart in a book?
+		Are not the bell and the whistle and the cloud
+		of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his
+		eyes words enough? They are the signals of
+		this man&#8217;s life beckoning to my life. Standing
+		in his engine there, making every wheel of that
+		engine thrill to his will, he is the priest of wonder
+		to me, and of the terror of the splendor of the
+		beauty of power. The train is the voice of his
+		life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of
+		strength. It is as the singing a man would sing
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page30" name="page30"></a>30</span>who felt his hand on the throttle of things. The
+		engine is a soul to me&#8212;soul of the quiet face
+		thundering past&#8212;leading its troop of glories
+		echoing along the hills, telling it to the flocks
+		in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it
+		to the trees and the buds and the little, trembling
+		growing things, that the might of the spirit
+		of man has passed that way.</p>
+
+		<p>If an engine is to be looked at from the point
+		of view of the man who makes it and who knows
+		it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a right to be
+		taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression
+		of the human spirit, as being that
+		man&#8217;s way of expressing the human spirit, there
+		shall be no escape for the children of this present
+		world, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the
+		strong delight in it that shall hem life in, and
+		bound it round on every side. The idealism and
+		passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer,
+		in the feeling he has about his machine, the
+		power with which that machine expresses that
+		feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations
+		of this modern age, a fragment of the new
+		apocalypse, vast and inarticulate and far and
+		faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now
+		from above, and now from below, and on every
+		side of life. It is as though the very ground
+		itself should speak,&#8212;speak to our poor, pitiful,
+		unspiritual, matter-despising souls,&#8212;should
+		command them to come forth, to live, to gaze
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page31" name="page31"></a>31</span>into the heart of matter for the heart of God. It
+		is so that the very dullest of us, standing among
+		our machines, can hardly otherwise than guess
+		the coming of some vast surprise,&#8212;the coming
+		of the day when, in the very rumble of the world,
+		our sons and daughters shall prophesy, and our
+		young men shall see visions, and our old men
+		shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I
+		do not dare to say it. What it means to our
+		religion and to our life and to our art, this great
+		athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I
+		only know that so long as the fine arts, in an
+		age like this, look down on the mechanical arts
+		there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so
+		long as the church worships the laborer&#8217;s God,
+		but does not reverence labor, there shall be no
+		religion in it for men to-day, and none for women
+		and children to-morrow. I only know that so
+		long as there is no poet amongst us, who can put
+		himself into a word, as this man, my brother
+		the engineer, is putting himself into his engine,
+		the engine shall remove mountains, and the word
+		of the poet shall not; it shall be buried beneath
+		the mountains. I only know that so long as we
+		have more preachers who can be hired to stop
+		preaching or to go into life insurance than we
+		have engineers who can be hired to leave their
+		engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in
+		engine cabs than in pulpits,&#8212;the vestibule trains
+		shall say deeper things than sermons say. In
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page32" name="page32"></a>32</span>the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along
+		the rails, we shall find again the worship we have
+		lost in church, the worship we fain would find in
+		the simpered prayers and paid praises of a
+		thousand choirs,&#8212;the worship of the creative
+		spirit, the beholding of a fragment of creation
+		morning, the watching of the delight of a man in
+		the delight of God,&#8212;in the first and last delight
+		of God. I have made a vow in my heart. I
+		shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every
+		word have the joy of God and of fathers and
+		mothers in it. And so long as men are more
+		creative and godlike in engines than they are
+		in sermons, I listen to engines.</p>
+
+		<p>Would to God it were otherwise. But so it
+		shall be with all of us. So it cannot but be.
+		Not until the day shall come when this wistful,
+		blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding
+		great and bitter love, with all her proud and
+		solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of life
+		sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall
+		she be worshipful; not until the love of all life
+		and the love of all love is her love, not until
+		all faces are her faces, not until the face of the engineer
+		peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand
+		souls, is beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is
+		beautiful or a stained glass window is beautiful,
+		shall the church be beautiful. That day is
+		bound to come. If the church will not do it
+		with herself, the great rough hand of the world
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page33" name="page33"></a>33</span>shall do it with the church. That day of the
+		new church shall be known by men because it
+		will be a day in which all worship shall be
+		gathered into her worship, in which her holy
+		house shall be the comradeship of all delights
+		and of all masteries under the sun, and all the
+		masteries and all the delights shall be laid at her
+		feet.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_1_ch_6" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page34" name="page34"></a>34</span>VI</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">PROPHETS</h3>
+		<p>The world follows the creative spirit.
+		Where the spirit is creating, the strong
+		and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit
+		is not in poetry, poetry will call itself something
+		else. If it is not in the church, religion will call
+		itself something else. It is the business of a
+		living religion, not to wish that the age it lives
+		in were some other age, but to tell what the age
+		is for, and what every man born in it is for. A
+		church that can see only what a few of the men
+		born in an age are for, can help only a few. If
+		a church does not believe in a particular man
+		more than he believes in himself, the less it tries
+		to do for him the better. If a church does not
+		believe in a man&#8217;s work as he believes in it, does
+		not see some divine meaning and spirit in it
+		and give him honor and standing and dignity
+		for the divine meaning in it; if it is a church in
+		which labor is secretly despised and in which it
+		is openly patronized, in which a man has more
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page35" name="page35"></a>35</span>honor for working feebly with his brain than for
+		working passionately and perfectly with his
+		hands, it is a church that stands outside of life.
+		It is excommunicated by the will of Heaven
+		and the nature of things, from the only Communion
+		that is large enough for a man to belong
+		to or for a God to bless.</p>
+
+		<p>If there is one sign rather than another of
+		religious possibility and spiritual worth in the
+		men who do the world&#8217;s work with machines
+		to-day, it is that these men are never persuaded
+		to attend a church that despises that work.</p>
+
+		<p>Symposiums on how to reach the masses are
+		pitiless irony. There is no need for symposiums.
+		It is an open secret. It cries upon the house-tops.
+		It calls above the world in the Sabbath
+		bells. A church that believes less than the
+		world believes shall lose its leadership in the
+		world. &#8220;Why should I pay pew rent,&#8221; says the
+		man who sings with his hands, &#8220;to men who do
+		not believe in me, to worship, with men who
+		do not believe in me, a God that does not believe
+		in me?&#8221; If heaven itself (represented as a rich
+		and idle place,&#8212;seats free in the evening) were
+		opened to the true laboring man on the condition
+		that he should despise his hands by holding
+		palms in them, he would find some excuse for
+		staying away. He feels in no wise different with
+		regard to his present life. &#8220;Unless your God,&#8221;
+		says the man who sings with his hands, to those
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page36" name="page36"></a>36</span>who pity him and do him good,&#8212;&#8220;unless your
+		God is a God I can worship in a factory, He is
+		not a God I care to worship in a church.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>Behold it is written: The church that does not
+		delight in these men and in what these men are
+		for, as much as the street delights in them, shall
+		give way to the street. The street is more beautiful.
+		If the street is not let into the church, it
+		shall sweep over the church and sweep around it,
+		shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above
+		it. From the roofs of labor&#8212;radiant and beautiful
+		labor&#8212;shall men look down upon its
+		towers. Only a church that believes more than
+		the world believes shall lead the world. It
+		always leads the world. It cannot help leading
+		it. The religion that lives in a machine age,
+		and that cannot see and feel, and make others
+		see and feel, the meaning of that machine age,
+		is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not
+		worthy of our machines. One of the machines
+		we have made could make a better religion than
+		this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost
+		every town or city where one goes, if one will
+		stop or look up or listen, one hears the chimneys
+		teaching the steeples. It would be blind
+		for more than a few years more to be discouraged
+		about modern religion. The telephone,
+		the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and
+		all the other great believers are singing up
+		around it. The very railroads are surrounding
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page37" name="page37"></a>37</span>it and taking care of it. A few years more
+		and the steeples will stop hesitating and tottering
+		in the sight of all the people. They will no
+		longer stand in fear before what the crowds
+		of chimneys and railways and the miles of
+		smokestacks sweeping past are saying to the
+		people.</p>
+
+		<p>They will listen to what the smokestacks are
+		saying to the people.</p>
+
+		<p>They will say it better.</p>
+
+		<p>In the meantime they are not listening.</p>
+
+		<p>Religion and art at the present moment,
+		both blindfolded and both with their ears
+		stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable
+		issue. By all poets and prophets the same
+		danger signal shall be seen spreading before them
+		both jogging along their old highways. It is the
+		arm that reaches across the age.</p>
+
+		<div class="chapter_ending">
+			<p>RAILROAD CROSSING</p>
+			<p>LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!</p>
+		</div>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page38" name="page38"></a>38</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<div id="Part_II" class="part">
+	<p class="part_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page39" name="page39"></a>39</span>PART II.</p>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page40" name="page40"></a>40</span></p>
+	<h2 class="part_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page41" name="page41"></a>41</span>THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES.</h2>
+	<div id="part_2_ch_1" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number">I</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">AS GOOD AS OURS</h3>
+		<p>One is always hearing it said that if a thing
+		is to be called poetic it must have great
+		ideas in it, and must successfully express them.
+		The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has
+		to meet the objection that, while a machine may
+		have great ideas in it, &#8220;it does not look it.&#8221; The
+		average machine not only fails to express the idea
+		that it stands for, but it generally expresses
+		something else. The language of the average
+		machine, when one considers what it is for, what
+		it is actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or
+		feeble. It is often absurd. It is a rare machine
+		which, when one looks for poetry in it, does not
+		make itself ridiculous.</p>
+
+		<p>The only answer that can be made to this
+		objection is that a steam-engine (when one
+		thinks of it) really expresses itself as well as the
+		rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and
+		absurd. We live in an organically inexpressible
+		world. The language of everything in it is
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page42" name="page42"></a>42</span>absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the
+		universe over our heads&#8212;with its cunning little
+		stars in it&#8212;is the height of absurdity, as a self-expression.
+		The sky laughs at us. We know
+		it when we look in a telescope. Time and space
+		are God&#8217;s jokes. Looked at strictly in its outer
+		language, the whole visible world is a joke. To
+		suppose that God has ever expressed Himself
+		to us in it, or to suppose that He could express
+		Himself in it, or that any one can express anything
+		in it, is not to see the point of the joke.</p>
+
+		<p>We cannot even express ourselves to one another.
+		The language of everything we use or
+		touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do
+		our living with&#8212;even the things that human beings
+		amuse themselves with&#8212;are inexpressive
+		and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and football
+		have all been accused in turn, by people
+		who do not know them from the inside, of being
+		meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey
+		anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight
+		of a golf-stick lying on a seat is a feeling to the
+		one to whom it belongs, a play of sense and
+		spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The
+		same is true of a new fiery-red baby, which, considering
+		the fuss that is made about it, to a
+		comparative outsider like a small boy, has
+		always been from the beginning of the world a
+		ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could
+		not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page43" name="page43"></a>43</span>time to it, of a more futile, reckless, hapless expression
+		of or pointer to an immortal soul than
+		a week-old baby wailing at time and space.
+		The idea of a baby may be all right, but in its
+		outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a failure,
+		and always has been. The same is true of our
+		other musical instruments. A horn caricatures
+		music. A flute is a man rubbing a black stick
+		with his lips. A trombone player is a monster.
+		We listen solemnly to the violin&#8212;the voice of
+		an archangel with a board tucked under his chin&#8212;and
+		to Girardi&#8217;s &#8217;cello&#8212;a whole human race
+		laughing and crying and singing to us between
+		a boy&#8217;s legs. The eye-language of the violin
+		has to be interpreted, and only people who are
+		cultivated enough to suppress whole parts of
+		themselves (rather useful and important parts
+		elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera&#8212;a huge
+		conspiracy of symbolism, every visible thing in
+		it standing for something that can not be seen,
+		beckoning at something that cannot be heard.
+		Nothing could possibly be more grotesque,
+		looked at from the outside or by a tourist from
+		another planet or another religion, than the
+		celebration of the Lord&#8217;s Supper in a Protestant
+		church. All things have their outer senses, and
+		these outer senses have to be learned one at a
+		time by being flashed through with inner ones.
+		Except to people who have tried it, nothing
+		could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page44" name="page44"></a>44</span>of human expression. A reception&#8212;a roomful
+		of people shouting at each other three inches
+		away&#8212;is comical enough. So is handshaking.
+		Looked at from the outside, what could be more
+		unimpressive than the spectacle of the greatest
+		dignitary of the United States put in a vise in
+		his own house for three hours, having his hand
+		squeezed by long rows of people? And, taken
+		as a whole, scurrying about in its din, what could
+		possibly be more grotesque than a great city&#8212;a
+		city looked at from almost any adequate,
+		respectable place for an immortal soul to look
+		from&#8212;a star, for instance, or a beautiful life?</p>
+
+		<p>Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels,
+		every outer token that pertains to man is absurd
+		and unfinished until some inner thing is put with
+		it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to
+		the other animals), rushing empty about space.
+		New York is a spectacle for a squirrel to laugh
+		at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man
+		is a mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living,
+		desk-infesting animal.</p>
+
+		<p>All these things being true of expression&#8212;both
+		the expression of men and of God&#8212;the fact that
+		machines which have poetry in them do not
+		express it very well does not trouble me much.
+		I do not forget the look of the first ocean-engine
+		I ever saw&#8212;four or five stories of it; nor do I
+		forget the look of the ocean-engine&#8217;s engineer
+		as in its mighty heart-beat he stood with his
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page45" name="page45"></a>45</span>strange, happy, helpless &#8220;Twelve thousand
+		horse-power, sir!&#8221; upon his lips.</p>
+
+		<p>That first night with my first engineer still
+		follows me. The time seems always coming
+		back to me again when he brought me up from
+		his whirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of
+		stars, and left me&#8212;my new wonder all stumbling
+		through me&#8212;alone with them and with my
+		thoughts.</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>The engines breathe.</p>
+				<p>No sound but cinders on the sails</p>
+				<p>And the ghostly heave,</p>
+				<p>The voice the wind makes in the mast&#8212;</p>
+				<p>And dainty gales</p>
+				<p>And fluffs of mist and smoking stars</p>
+				<p>Floating past&#8212;</p>
+				<p>From night-lit funnels.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>In the wild of the heart of God I stand.</p>
+				<p>Time and Space</p>
+				<p>Wheel past my face.</p>
+				<p>Forever. Everywhere.</p>
+				<p>I alone.</p>
+				<p>Beyond the Here and There</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page46" name="page46"></a>46</span>Now and Then</p>
+				<p>Of men,</p>
+				<p>Winds from the unknown</p>
+				<p>Round me blow</p>
+				<p>Blow to the unknown again.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Out in its solitude I hear the prow</p>
+				<p>Beyond the silence-crowded decks</p>
+				<p>Laughing and shouting</p>
+				<p>At Night,</p>
+				<p>Lashing the heads and necks</p>
+				<p>Of the lifted seas,</p>
+				<p>That in their flight</p>
+				<p>Urge onward</p>
+				<p>And rise and sweep and leap and sink</p>
+				<p>To the very brink</p>
+				<p>Of Heaven.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Timber and steel and smoke</p>
+				<p>And Sleep</p>
+				<p>Thousand-souled</p>
+				<p>A quiver,</p>
+				<p>A deadened thunder,</p>
+				<p>A vague and countless creep</p>
+				<p>Through the hold,</p>
+				<p>The weird and dusky chariot lunges on</p>
+				<p>Through Fate.</p>
+				<p>From the lookout watch of my soul&#8217;s eyes</p>
+				<p>Above the houses of the deep</p>
+				<p>Their shadowy haunches fall and rise</p>
+				<p>&#8212;O&#8217;er the glimmer-gabled roofs</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page47" name="page47"></a>47</span>The flying of their hoofs,</p>
+				<p>Through the wonder and the dark</p>
+				<p>Where skies and waters meet</p>
+				<p>The shimmer of manes and knees</p>
+				<p>Dust of seas&#8230;</p>
+				<p>The sound of breathing, urge, confusion</p>
+				<p>And the beat, the starlight beat</p>
+				<p>Soft and far and stealthy-fleet</p>
+				<p>Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_2_ch_2" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page48" name="page48"></a>48</span>II</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">ON BEING BUSY AND STILL</h3>
+		<p>One of the hardest things about being an
+		inventor is that the machines (excepting
+		the poorer ones) never show off. The first time
+		that the phonograph (whose talking had been
+		rumored of many months) was allowed to talk
+		in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen,
+		New Jersey, and, much to Mr. Edison&#8217;s dismay,
+		everybody laughed. Instead of being impressed
+		with the real idea of the phonograph&#8212;being
+		impressed because it could talk at all&#8212;people
+		were impressed because it talked through its
+		nose.</p>
+
+		<p>The more modern a machine is, when a man
+		stands before it and seeks to know it,&#8212;the more
+		it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his
+		imagination and his soul,&#8212;the less it is willing
+		to appeal to the outside of him. If he will not
+		look with his whole being at a twin-screw
+		steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under
+		water. This is one of the chief characteristics
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page49" name="page49"></a>49</span>of the modern world, that its poetry is under
+		water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering
+		around in the big seas, pounding the air and
+		water both with her huge, showy paddles, is
+		not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the
+		poetry in the sailboat is not so obvious, so
+		plainly on top, as in a gondola.</p>
+
+		<p>People who do not admit poetry in machinery
+		in general admit that there is poetry in a Dutch
+		windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A
+		Dutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill,
+		being improved so much that it does not
+		flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it at
+		all. The same general principle holds good
+		with every machine that has been invented.
+		The more the poet&#8212;that is, the inventor&#8212;works
+		on it, the less the poetry in it shows.
+		Progress in a modern machine, if one watches it
+		in its various stages, always consists in making
+		a machine stop posing and get down to work.
+		The earlier locomotive, puffing helplessly along
+		with a few cars on its crooked rails, was much
+		more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque
+		than the present one, and the locomotive that
+		came next, while very different, was more impressive
+		than the present one. Every one
+		remembers it,&#8212;the important-looking, bell-headed,
+		woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty
+		years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits
+		and its ceaseless water-drinking habits, with its
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page50" name="page50"></a>50</span>grim, spreading cowcatcher and its huge plug-hat&#8212;who
+		does not remember it&#8212;fussing up and
+		down stations, ringing its bell forever and
+		whistling at everything in sight? It was impossible
+		to travel on a train at all thirty years
+		ago without always thinking of the locomotive.
+		It shoved itself at people. It was always doing
+		things&#8212;now at one end of the train and now at
+		the other, ringing its bell down the track, blowing
+		in at the windows, it fumed and spread
+		enough in hauling three cars from Boston to
+		Concord to get to Chicago and back. It was
+		the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines were
+		made. One takes a train from New York to
+		San Francisco now, and scarcely knows there is
+		an engine on it. All he knows is that he is
+		going, and sometimes the going is so good he
+		hardly knows that.</p>
+
+		<p>The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed,
+		large-limbed, silent ones, plunging with
+		smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of
+		space&#8212;engines without any faces, blind, grim,
+		conquering, lifting the world&#8212;are more poetic
+		to some of us than the old engines were, for the
+		very reason that they are not so poetic-looking.
+		They are less showy, more furtive, suggestive,
+		modern and perfect.</p>
+
+		<p>In proportion as a machine is modern it hides
+		its face. It refuses to look as poetic as it is;
+		and if it makes a sound, it is almost always a
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page51" name="page51"></a>51</span>sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs
+		to some one else. The trolley-wire, lifting a
+		whole city home to supper, is a giant with a
+		falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding,
+		is not characteristic of the modern
+		spirit. In so far as it exists at all in the modern
+		age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it
+		exists because it is accidental or left over. There
+		was a deep bass steamer on the Mississippi once,
+		with a very small head of steam, which any one
+		would have admitted had poetry in it&#8212;old-fashioned
+		poetry. Every time it whistled it
+		stopped.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_2_ch_3" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page52" name="page52"></a>52</span>III</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">ON NOT SHOWING OFF</h3>
+		<p>It is not true to say that the modern man
+		does not care for poetry. He does not care
+		for poetry that bears on&#8212;or for eloquent poetry.
+		He cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old
+		sense he does not care for eloquence in anything.
+		The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks
+		to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned
+		down. Votes are facts, and if the votes are to
+		be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The
+		doctor who stands best with the typical modern
+		patient is not the most agreeable, sociable,
+		jogging-about man a town contains, like the
+		doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He
+		even prescribes less, and the reason that it is
+		hard to be a modern minister (already cut down
+		from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty
+		minutes) is that one has to practise more than
+		one can preach.</p>
+
+		<p>To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic,
+		to stand for more than one says or looks&#8212;the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page53" name="page53"></a>53</span>little girl with her loom clothing twelve hundred
+		people. People like it. They are used to it.
+		All life around them is filled with it. The old-fashioned
+		prayer-meeting is dying out in the
+		modern church because it is a mere specialty
+		in modern life. The prayer-meeting recognizes
+		but one way of praying, and people who have a
+		gift for praying that way go, but the majority of
+		people&#8212;people who have discovered that there
+		are a thousand other ways of praying, and who
+		like them better&#8212;stay away.</p>
+
+		<p>When the telegraph machine was first thought
+		of, the words all showed on the outside. When
+		it was improved it became inner and subtle.
+		The messages were read by sound. Everything
+		we have which improves at all improves in the
+		same way. The exterior conception of righteousness
+		of a hundred years ago&#8212;namely, that
+		a man must do right because it is his duty&#8212;is
+		displaced by the modern one, the morally
+		thorough one&#8212;namely, that a man must do
+		right because he likes it&#8212;do it from the inside.
+		The more improved righteousness is, the less it
+		shows on the outside. The more modern
+		righteousness is, the more it looks like selfishness,
+		the better the modern world likes it, and the more
+		it counts.</p>
+
+		<p>On the whole, it is against a thing rather than
+		in its favor, in the twentieth century, that it
+		looks large. Time was when if it had not been
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page54" name="page54"></a>54</span>known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered
+		heaven with a glass three feet long, men would
+		have said that it would hardly do to discover
+		heaven with anything less than six hundred
+		feet long. To the ancients, Galileo&#8217;s instrument,
+		even if it had been practical, would not have
+		been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however,
+		the fact that Galileo&#8217;s star-tool was three
+		feet long, that he carried a new heaven about
+		with him in his hands, was half the poetry and
+		wonder of it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking
+		as the six-hundred-foot telescope invented later,
+		which never worked.</p>
+
+		<p>Nothing could be more impressive than the
+		original substantial <span class="keep_together">R&#8212;&#8212;</span> typewriter. One felt,
+		every time he touched a letter, as if he must
+		have said a sentence. It was like saying things
+		with pile-drivers. The machine obtruded itself
+		at every point. It flourished its means and
+		ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One
+		commenced every new line with his foot.</p>
+
+		<p>The same general principle may be seen running
+		alike through machinery and through life.
+		The history of man is traced in water-wheels.
+		The overshot wheel belonged to a period when
+		everything else&#8212;religion, literature, and art&#8212;was
+		overshot. When, as time passed on, common
+		men began to think, began to think under
+		a little, the Reformation came in&#8212;and the
+		undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page55" name="page55"></a>55</span>is no denying that the overshot wheel is more
+		poetic-looking&#8212;it does its work with twelve
+		quarts of water at a time and shows every quart&#8212;but
+		it soon develops into the undershot wheel,
+		which shows only the drippings of the water,
+		and the undershot wheel develops into the
+		turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of
+		sight&#8212;except its work. The water in the six
+		turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand
+		horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive
+		and poetic-looking as six turbine wheels&#8217; worth
+		of water would be&#8212;wasted and going over the
+		Falls.</p>
+
+		<p>The main fact about the modern man as
+		regards poetry is, that he prefers poetry that
+		has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It
+		is because most of the poetry the modern man
+		gets a chance to see to-day is merely going over
+		the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal
+		to the modern man. He supposes so himself.
+		He supposes that a dynamo (forty street-cars on
+		forty streets, flying through the dark) is not
+		poetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit,
+		spellbound, more than any poetry that is being
+		written. The things that are hidden&#8212;the
+		things that are spiritual and wondering&#8212;are
+		the ones that appeal to him. The idle,
+		foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He
+		gropes in his own body silently, harmlessly
+		with the X-ray, and watches with awe the beating
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page56" name="page56"></a>56</span>of his heart. He glories in inner essences,
+		both in his life and in his art. He is the disciple
+		of the X-ray, the defier of appearances. Why
+		should a man who has seen the inside of matter
+		care about appearances, either in little things or
+		great? Or why argue about the man, or argue
+		about the man&#8217;s God, or quibble with words?
+		Perhaps he is matter. Perhaps he is spirit.
+		If he is spirit, he is matter-loving spirit, and if
+		he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter. Every
+		time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes
+		it (as God makes mountains out of sunlight)
+		a material thing. Every time he touches a
+		material thing, in proportion as he touches it
+		mightily he brings out inner light in it. He
+		spiritualizes it. He abandons the glistening
+		brass knocker&#8212;pleasing symbol to the outer
+		sense&#8212;for a tiny knob on his porch door and a
+		far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass
+		knocker does not appeal to the spirit enough
+		for the modern man, nor to the imagination. He
+		wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bell
+		with. He loves to wake the unseen. He
+		will not even ring a door-bell if he can help it.
+		He likes it better, by touching a button, to have
+		a door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals
+		down in his cellar chewing each other. He
+		likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs with
+		a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He
+		may be seen riding in three stories along his
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page57" name="page57"></a>57</span>streets, but he takes his engines all off the tracks
+		and crowds them into one engine and puts it out
+		of sight. The more a thing is out of the sight
+		of his eyes the more his soul sees it and glories
+		in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden
+		water spouts over his head and pours beneath
+		his feet through his house. Hidden light creeps
+		through the dark in it. The more might, the
+		more subtlety. He hauls the whole human
+		race around the crust of the earth with a
+		vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids&#8212;sixty
+		miles an hour&#8212;with invisible air. He
+		photographs the tone of his voice on a platinum
+		plate. His voice reaches across death with the
+		platinum plate. He is heard of the unborn.
+		If he speaks in either one of his worlds he takes
+		two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut
+		in with one. If he lives in either he wraps the
+		other about him. He makes men walk on air.
+		He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks
+		open mountains with gas. The more perfect
+		he makes his machines the more spiritual they
+		are, the more their power hides itself. The
+		more the machines of the man loom in human
+		life the more they reach down into silence, and
+		into darkness. Their foundations are infinity.
+		The infinity which is the man&#8217;s infinity is their
+		infinity. The machines grasp all space for
+		him. They lean out on ether. They are the
+		man&#8217;s machines. The man has made them and
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page58" name="page58"></a>58</span>the man worships with them. From the first
+		breath of flame, burning out the secret of the
+		Dust to the last shadow of the dust&#8212;the breathless,
+		soundless shadow of the dust, which he
+		calls electricity&#8212;the man worships the invisible,
+		the intangible. Electricity is his prophet.
+		It sums him up. It sums up his modern world
+		and the religion and the arts of his modern
+		world. Out of all the machines that he has
+		made the electric machine is the most modern
+		because it is the most spiritual. The empty
+		and futile look of a trolley wire does not trouble
+		the modern man. It is his instinctive expression
+		of himself. All the habits of electricity
+		are his habits. Electricity has the modern
+		man&#8217;s temperament&#8212;the passion of being invisible
+		and irresistible. The electric machine
+		fills him with brotherhood and delight. It is
+		the first of the machines that he can not help
+		seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the
+		man&#8217;s highest self. His own soul beckons to
+		him out of it.</p>
+
+		<p>And the more electricity grows the more like
+		the man it grows, the more spirit-like it is. The
+		telegraph wire around the globe is melted into
+		the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit
+		break away from the dust. They envelop
+		the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at last,
+		unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light
+		of stars,&#8212;fights its way to God.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page59" name="page59"></a>59</span>The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless
+		ground or through the froth of heaven for the
+		spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which
+		makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph,
+		which makes earth out of air, he delves
+		into the deepest sea as a cloud. He strides
+		heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment
+		at last of <span class="emphasized">Electricity</span>&#8212;the archangel of matter.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_2_ch_4" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page60" name="page60"></a>60</span>IV</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD</h3>
+		<p>Religion consists in being proud of the
+		Creator. Poetry is largely the same feeling&#8212;a
+		kind of personal joy one takes in the way
+		the world is made and is being made every
+		morning. The true lover of nature is touched
+		with a kind of cosmic family pride every time
+		he looks up from his work&#8212;sees the night and
+		morning, still and splendid, hanging over him.
+		Probably if there were another universe than
+		this one, to go and visit in, or if there were an
+		extra Creator we could go to&#8212;some of us&#8212;and
+		boast about the one we have, it would afford
+		infinite relief among many classes of people&#8212;especially
+		poets.</p>
+
+		<p>The most common sign that poetry, real
+		poetry, exists in the modern human heart is
+		the pride that people are taking in the world.
+		The typical modern man, whatever may be said
+		or not said of his religion, of his attitude
+		toward the maker of the world, has regular and
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page61" name="page61"></a>61</span>almost daily habits of being proud of the world.</p>
+
+		<p>In the twentieth century the best way for a
+		man to worship God is going to be to realize
+		his own nature, to recognize what he is for, and
+		be a god, too. We believe to-day that the best
+		recognition of God consists in recognizing the
+		fact that he is not a mere God who does divine
+		things himself, but a God who can make others
+		do them.</p>
+
+		<p>Looked at from the point of view of a mere
+		God who does divine things himself, an earthquake,
+		for instance, may be called a rather
+		feeble affair, a slight jar to a ball going <span class="keep_together">&#8212;&#8212;</span> miles
+		an hour&#8212;a Creator could do little less, if
+		He gave a bare thought to it&#8212;but when I waked
+		a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in
+		my own house as if it were a hammock, and was
+		told that some men down in Hazardville, Connecticut,
+		had managed to shake the planet like
+		that, with some gunpowder they had made, I
+		felt a new respect for Messrs. <span class="keep_together">&#8212;&#8212;</span> and Co.
+		I was proud of man, my brother. Does he
+		not shake loose the Force of Gravity&#8212;make
+		the very hand of God to tremble? To his
+		thoughts the very hills, with their hearts of
+		stone, make soft responses&#8212;when he thinks
+		them.</p>
+
+		<p>The Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in &#8217;76,
+		under its sky of iron and glass, is remembered by
+		many people the day they saw it first as one of
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page62" name="page62"></a>62</span>the great experiences of life. Like some vast,
+		Titanic spirit, soul of a thousand, thousand
+		wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mighty silence
+		there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve-year-old
+		boy, at least, the thought of the hour he
+		spent with that engine first is a thought he sings
+		and prays with to this day. His lips trembled
+		before it. He sought to hide himself in its
+		presence. Why had no one ever taught him
+		anything before? As he looks back through his
+		life there is one experience that stands out by
+		itself in all those boyhood years&#8212;the choking in
+		his throat&#8212;the strange grip upon him&#8212;upon
+		his body and upon his soul&#8212;as of some awful
+		unseen Hand reaching down Space to him, drawing
+		him up to Its might. He was like a dazed
+		child being held up before It&#8212;held up to an
+		infinite fact, that he might look at it again and
+		again.</p>
+
+		<p>The first conception of what the life of man
+		was like, of what it might be like, came to at
+		least one immortal soul not from lips that he
+		loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice
+		behind a desk, but from a machine. To this
+		day that Corliss engine is the engine of dreams,
+		the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and
+		to the soul. It rebuilds the universe. It is the
+		opportunity of beauty throughout life, the
+		symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of
+		the unity of nations, and of the worship of God.
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page63" name="page63"></a>63</span>In silence&#8212;like the soft far running of the sky&#8212;it
+		wrought upon him there; like some heroic
+		human spirit, its finger on a thousand wheels,
+		through miles of aisles, and crowds of gazers,
+		it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as
+		the beat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering
+		matter, of the clay conquering God.</p>
+
+		<p>Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices
+		surrounded me. It was the first hearing of the
+		psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was
+		like the spell of ages upon me; and the vision
+		that floated in it&#8212;nay, the vision that was builded
+		in it&#8212;was the vision of the age to be: the vision
+		of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and
+		dance and drone of his sad four thousand years,
+		lifting himself to the stature of his soul at last,
+		lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain,
+		and with the wind, and the heat and the light,
+		into comradeship with Creation morning, and
+		into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion)
+		of the might and gentleness of God.</p>
+
+		<p>There seem to be two ways to worship Him.
+		One way is to gaze upon the great Machine that
+		He has made, to watch it running softly above
+		us all, moonlight and starlight, and winter and
+		summer, rain and snowflakes, and growing
+		things. Another way is to worship Him not
+		only because He has made the vast and still
+		machine of creation, in the beating of whose
+		days and nights we live our lives, but because
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page64" name="page64"></a>64</span>He has made a Machine that can make machines&#8212;because
+		out of the dust of the earth He has
+		made a Machine that shall take more of the dust
+		of the earth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd
+		it into steel and iron and say, &#8220;Go ye now,
+		depths of the earth&#8212;heights of heaven&#8212;serve
+		ye me. I, too, am God. Stones and mists,
+		winds and waters and thunder&#8212;the spirit that
+		is in thee is my spirit. I also&#8212;even I also&#8212;am
+		God!&#8221;</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_2_ch_5" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page65" name="page65"></a>65</span>V</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">A MODEST UNIVERSE</h3>
+		<p>I have heard it objected that a machine does
+		not take hold of a man with its great ideas
+		while he stands and watches it. It does not
+		make him feel its great ideas. And therefore
+		it is denied that it is poetic.</p>
+
+		<p>The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts
+		of machinery is not denied. What seems to be
+		lacking in the machines from the artistic point
+		of view at present is a mere knack of making
+		the faces plain and literal-looking. Grasshoppers
+		would be more appreciated by more people
+		if they were made with microscopes on,&#8212;either
+		the grasshoppers or the people.</p>
+
+		<p>If the mere machinery of a grasshopper&#8217;s hop
+		could be made plain and large enough, there is
+		not a man living who would not be impressed
+		by it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page66" name="page66"></a>66</span>quite as easily have been) 640 feet high, the huge
+		beams of their legs above their bodies towering
+		like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity
+		of a grasshopper&#8217;s machinery&#8212;the huge levers
+		of it, his hops across valleys from mountain to
+		mountain, shadowing fields and villages&#8212;would
+		have been one of the impressive features of
+		human life. Everybody would be willing to
+		admit of the mere machinery of a grasshopper,
+		(if there were several acres of it) that there was
+		creative sublimity in it. They would admit
+		that the bare idea of having such a stately piece
+		of machinery in a world at all, slipping softly
+		around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity
+		in it; and yet these same people because the
+		sublimity, instead of being spread over several
+		acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter,
+		are not impressed by it.</p>
+
+		<p>But it is objected, it is not merely a matter
+		of spiritual size. There is something more than
+		plainness lacking in the symbolism of machinery.
+		&#8220;The symbolism of machinery is lacking in
+		fitness. It is not poetic.&#8221; &#8220;A thing can only
+		be said to be poetic in proportion as its form
+		expresses its nature.&#8221; Mechanical inventions
+		may stand for impressive facts, but such inventions,
+		no matter how impressive the facts may
+		be, cannot be called poetic unless their form
+		expresses those facts. A horse plunging and
+		champing his bits on the eve of battle, for instance,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page67" name="page67"></a>67</span>is impressive to a man, and a pill-box
+		full of dynamite, with a spark creeping toward
+		it, is not.</p>
+
+		<p>That depends partly on the man and partly
+		on the spark. A man may not be impressed by
+		a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping
+		toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second
+		time he sees it, if he has time, he is impressed
+		enough. He does not stand and criticise the
+		lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to
+		remember the day when he all but lost his life
+		because</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>A pill-box by the river&#8217;s brim</p>
+				<p>A simple pill-box was to him</p>
+				<p>And nothing more.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p>Wordsworth in these memorable lines has
+		summed up and brought to an issue the whole
+		matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has
+		its language, and the power of feeling what a
+		thing means, by the way it looks, is a matter of
+		experience&#8212;of learning the language. The language
+		is there. The fact that the language of
+		the machine is a new language, and a strangely
+		subtle one, does not prove that it is not a language,
+		that its symbolism is not good, and
+		that there is not poetry in machinery.</p>
+
+		<p>The inventor need not be troubled because in
+		making his machine it does not seem to express.
+		It is written that neither you nor I, comrade
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page68" name="page68"></a>68</span>nor God, nor any man, nor any man&#8217;s machine,
+		nor God&#8217;s machine, in this world shall express
+		or be expressed. If it is the meaning of life to
+		us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we
+		are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting
+		a star awhile, creeping about on it, warmed
+		by a heater ninety-five million miles away.
+		The machine of the universe itself, does not express
+		its Inventor. It does not even express the
+		men who are under it. The ninety-five millionth
+		mile waits on us silently, at the doorways
+		of our souls night and day, and we wait on
+		<span class="emphasized">It</span>. Is it not <span class="emphasized">There</span>? Is it not <span class="emphasized">Here</span>&#8212;this
+		ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs
+		in our veins. Why should Man&#8212;a being who
+		can live forever in a day, who is born of a boundless
+		birth, who takes for his fireside the immeasurable&#8212;express
+		or expect to be expressed?
+		What we would like to be&#8212;even what we are&#8212;who
+		can say? Our music is an apostrophe to
+		dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly,
+		resistlessly on, over the pantomime within us.
+		We and our machines, both, hewing away on
+		the infinite, beckon and are still.</p>
+
+		<p>I am not troubled because the machines do
+		not seem to express themselves. I do not know
+		that they can express themselves. I know that
+		when the day is over, and strength is spent, and
+		my soul looks out upon the great plain&#8212;upon
+		the soft, night-blooming cities, with their huge
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page69" name="page69"></a>69</span>machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out
+		upon me. I rest.</p>
+
+		<p>I know that when I stand before a foundry
+		hammering out the floors of the world, clashing
+		its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my
+		soul to it, and in some way&#8212;I know not how&#8212;while
+		it sings to me I grow strong and glad.</p>
+	</div>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page70" name="page70"></a>70</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<div id="Part_III" class="part">
+	<p class="part_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page71" name="page71"></a>71</span>PART THREE</p>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page72" name="page72"></a>72</span></p>
+	<h2 class="part_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page73" name="page73"></a>73</span>THE MACHINES AS POETS</h2>
+	<div id="part_3_ch_1" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number">I</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS</h3>
+		<p>I have an old friend who lives just around the
+		corner from one of the main lines of travel
+		in New England, and whenever I am passing near
+		by and the railroads let me, I drop in on him
+		awhile and quarrel about art. It&#8217;s a good old-fashioned
+		comfortable, disorderly conversation
+		we have generally, the kind people used to have
+		more than they do now&#8212;sketchy and not too
+		wise&#8212;the kind that makes one think of things
+		one wishes one had said, afterward.</p>
+
+		<p>We always drift a little at first, as if of course
+		we could talk about other things if we wanted
+		to, but we both know, and know every time,
+		that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion
+		of the Things That Are Beautiful and
+		the Things That Are Not.</p>
+
+		<p>Brim thinks that I have picked out more things
+		to be beautiful than I have a right to, or than
+		any man has, and he is trying to put a stop to it.
+		He thinks that there are enough beautiful things
+		in this world that have been beautiful a long
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page74" name="page74"></a>74</span>while, without having people&#8212;well, people like
+		me, for instance, poking blindly around among
+		all these modern brand-new things hoping that
+		in spite of appearances there is something one can
+		do with them that will make them beautiful
+		enough to go with the rest. I&#8217;m afraid Brim
+		gets a little personal in talking with me at times
+		and I might as well say that, while disagreeing
+		in a conversation with Brim does not lead to
+		calling names it does seem to lead logically to
+		one&#8217;s going away, and trying to find afterwards,
+		some thing that is the matter with him.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is,&#8221; I
+		say (on paper, afterwards, as the train speeds
+		away), &#8220;that you have a false-classic or Stucco-Greek
+		mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks,
+		would have liked all these things&#8212;trolley cars,
+		cables, locomotives,&#8212;seen the beautiful in them,
+		if they had to do their living with them every
+		day, the way we do. You would say you were
+		more Greek than I am, but when one thinks of
+		it, you are just going around liking the things
+		the Greeks liked 3000 years ago, and I am around
+		liking the things a Greek would like now, that
+		is, as well as I can. I don&#8217;t flatter myself I begin
+		to enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way
+		Plato would if he had the chance, and Alcibiades
+		in an automobile would get a great deal
+		more out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen
+		in one, so far; and I suspect that if Socrates could
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page75" name="page75"></a>75</span>take Bliss Carman and, say, William Watson
+		around with him on a tour of the General Electric
+		Works in Schenectady they wouldn&#8217;t either
+		of them write sonnets about anything else for
+		the rest of their natural lives.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>I can only speak for one and I do not begin
+		to see the poetry in the machines that a Greek
+		would see, as yet.</p>
+
+		<p>But I have seen enough.</p>
+
+		<p>I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this
+		planet, making it small enough, welding the
+		nations together before my eyes.</p>
+
+		<p>I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at
+		midnight with a whirl of visions, with a whirl
+		of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the
+		world.</p>
+
+		<p>I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men&#8212;the
+		five thousand of them&#8212;the grime on their
+		faces and the great caldrons of melted railroad
+		swinging above their heads. I have stood and
+		watched them there with lightning and with
+		flame hammering out the wills of cities, putting in
+		the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me
+		me that Bliss Carman and William Watson would
+		not be ashamed of them &#8230; brother-artists
+		every one &#8230; in the glory &#8230; in the dark &#8230; Vulcan-Tennysons,
+		blacksmiths to a planet,
+		with dredges, skyscrapers, steam shovels and
+		wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens
+		and the earth.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_3_ch_2" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page76" name="page76"></a>76</span>II</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH</h3>
+		<p>The poetry of machinery to-day is a mere
+		matter of fact&#8212;a part of the daily wonder
+		of life to countless silent people. The next thing
+		the world wants to know about machinery is
+		not that there is poetry in it, but that the poetry
+		which the common people have already found
+		there, has a right to be there. We have the fact.
+		It is the theory to put with the fact which concerns
+		us next and which really troubles us most.
+		There are very few of us, on the whole, who can
+		take any solid comfort in a fact&#8212;no matter what
+		it is&#8212;until we have a theory to approve of it
+		with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to
+		make very much difference.</p>
+
+		<p>1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is
+		an expression of the soul.</p>
+		<p>2. It expresses the soul (1) of the individual
+		man who creates the machine&#8212;the inventor,
+		and (2) the man who lives with the machine
+		the engineer.</p>
+		<p>3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God
+		who can make men who can thus express their
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page77" name="page77"></a>77</span>souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the
+		least sense if not in the greatest. If a man who
+		can make machines like this is not clever enough
+		with all his powers to find a God, and to worship
+		a God, he can worship himself. It is
+		because the poetry of machinery is the kind of
+		poetry that does immeasurable things instead
+		of immeasurably singing about them that it has
+		been quite generally taken for granted that it
+		is not poetry at all. The world has learned
+		more of the purely poetic idea of freedom from
+		a few dumb, prosaic machines that have not
+		been able to say anything beautiful about it
+		than from the poets of twenty centuries. The
+		machine frees a hundred thousand men and
+		smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on
+		freedom and has his bust in Westminster Abbey.
+		The blacks in America were freed by Abraham
+		Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument
+		for unity&#8212;the argument against secession&#8212;was
+		the locomotive. No one can fight the locomotive
+		very long. It makes the world over into
+		one world whether it wants to be one world or
+		not. China is being conquered by steamships.
+		It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new
+		one. Seers and poets have made poetry out
+		of it for two thousand years. Machinery is
+		making the poetry mean something. Every
+		new invention in matter that comes to us is
+		a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page78" name="page78"></a>78</span>ideas. The Bessemer process has more political
+		philosophy in it than was ever dreamed of in
+		Shelley&#8217;s poetry, and it would not be hard to
+		show that the invention of the sewing machine
+		was one of the most literary and artistic as well
+		as one of the most religious events of the nineteenth
+		century. The loom is the most beautiful
+		thought that any one has ever had about Woman,
+		and the printing press is more wonderful
+		than anything that has ever been said on it.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;This is all very true,&#8221; interrupts the Logical
+		Person, &#8220;about printing presses and looms and
+		everything else&#8212;one could go on forever&#8212;but
+		it does not prove anything. It may be true
+		that the loom has made twenty readers for
+		Robert Browning&#8217;s poetry where Browning
+		would have made but one, but it does not follow
+		that because the loom has freed women for
+		beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is
+		a fit theme for poetry.&#8221; &#8220;Besides&#8221;&#8212;breaks
+		in the Minor Poet&#8212;&#8220;there is a difference between
+		a thing&#8217;s being full of big ideas and its
+		being beautiful. A foundry is powerful and
+		interesting, but is it beautiful the way an electric
+		fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>This brings to a point the whole question as
+		to where the definition of beauty&#8212;the boundary
+		line of beauty&#8212;shall be placed. A thing&#8217;s being
+		considered beautiful is largely a matter of size.
+		The question &#8220;Is a thing beautiful?&#8221; resolves
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page79" name="page79"></a>79</span>itself into &#8220;How large has a beautiful thing a
+		right to be?&#8221; A man&#8217;s theory of beauty depends,
+		in a universe like this, upon how much of
+		the universe he will let into it. If he is afraid of
+		the universe if he only lets his thoughts and
+		passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to
+		assume that if a beautiful thing rises into the
+		sublime and immeasurable&#8212;suggests boundless
+		ideas&#8212;the beauty is blurred out of it. It is
+		something&#8212;there is no denying that it is something&#8212;but,
+		whatever it is or is not, it is not
+		beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life
+		is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets
+		are dumb because they see more poetry than
+		their theories have room for. The fundamental
+		idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity.
+		Our theories of poetry were made&#8212;most of
+		them&#8212;before infinity was discovered.</p>
+
+		<p>Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity
+		exists&#8212;a kind of huge, empty rim around human
+		life&#8212;is not a new idea to us, but the idea
+		that this same infinity has or can have anything
+		to do with us or with our arts, or our theories of
+		art, or that we have anything to do with <span class="emphasized smaller_caps">it</span>,
+		is an essentially modern discovery. The actual
+		experience of infinity&#8212;that is, the experience
+		of being infinite (comparatively speaking)&#8212;as
+		in the use of machinery, is a still more modern
+		discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of
+		saying what modern machinery really is, than
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page80" name="page80"></a>80</span>to say that it is a recent invention for being
+		infinite.</p>
+
+		<p>The machines of the world are all practically
+		engaged in manufacturing the same thing. They
+		are all time-and-space-machines. They knit
+		time and space. Hundreds of thousands of
+		things may be put in machines this very day,
+		for us, before night falls, but only eternity and
+		infinity shall be turned out. Sometimes it is
+		called one and sometimes the other. If a man
+		is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little
+		difference which. It is merely a matter of form
+		whether one is everywhere a few years, or anywhere
+		forever. A sewing machine is as much
+		a means of communication as a printing press
+		or a locomotive. The locomotive takes a woman
+		around the world. The sewing machine
+		gives her a new world where she is. At every
+		point where a machine touches the life of a human
+		being, it serves him with a new measure of
+		infinity.</p>
+
+		<p>This would seem to be a poetic thing for a
+		machine to do. Traditional poetry does not
+		see any poetry in it, because, according to our
+		traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an
+		old, established institution in human life, and
+		infinity is not.</p>
+
+		<p>No one has wanted to be infinite before.
+		Poetry in the ancient world was largely engaged
+		in protecting people from the Infinite. They
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page81" name="page81"></a>81</span>were afraid of it. They could not help feeling
+		that the Infinite was over them. Worship consisted
+		in propitiating it, poetry in helping people
+		to forget it. With the exception of Job, the
+		Hebrews almost invariably employed a poet&#8212;when
+		they could get one&#8212;as a kind of transfigured
+		policeman&#8212;to keep the sky off. It was
+		what was expected of poets.</p>
+
+		<p>The Greeks did the same thing in a different
+		way. The only difference was, that the Greeks,
+		instead of employing their poets to keep the
+		sky off, employed them to make it as much like
+		the earth as possible&#8212;a kind of raised platform
+		which was less dreadful and more familiar and
+		homelike and answered the same general purpose.
+		In other words, the sky became beautiful
+		to the Greek when he had made it small enough.
+		Making it small enough was the only way a
+		Greek knew of making it beautiful.</p>
+
+		<p>Galileo knew another way. It is because
+		Galileo knew another way&#8212;because he knew
+		that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to
+		make it large enough&#8212;that men are living in a
+		new world. A new religion beats down through
+		space to us. A new poetry lifts away the ceilings
+		of our dreams. The old sky, with its little
+		tent of stars, its film of flame and darkness
+		burning over us, has floated to the past. The
+		twentieth century&#8212;the home of the Infinite&#8212;arches
+		over our human lives. The heaven is
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page82" name="page82"></a>82</span>no longer, to the sons of men, a priests&#8217; wilderness,
+		nor is it a poet&#8217;s heaven&#8212;a paper, painted
+		heaven, with little painted paper stars in it, to
+		hide the wilderness.</p>
+
+		<p>It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these
+		latter years, that has seen it crashing and breaking
+		through the old one, can deny that what is
+		over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave
+		of it, scooped out at last over our little naked,
+		foolish lives, our running-about philosophies,
+		our religions, and our governments&#8212;it is the
+		main fact about us. Arts and literatures&#8212;ants
+		under a stone, thousands of years, blind with
+		light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding
+		themselves.</p>
+
+		<p>But not long for dreams. More than this.
+		The new heaven is matched by a new earth.
+		Men who see a new heaven make a new earth.
+		In its cloud of steam, in a kind of splendid,
+		silent stammer of praise and love, the new earth
+		lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out
+		of nights to It, digs wells for winds under It,
+		lights darkness with falling water, makes ice
+		out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws down
+		Space with engines, makes years out of moments
+		with machines. It is a new world and all the
+		men that are born upon it are new widemoving,
+		cloud and mountain-moving men. The
+		habits of stars and waters, the huge habits of
+		space and time, are the habits of the men.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page83" name="page83"></a>83</span>The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by
+		hung over us&#8212;the mere hiding place of Death,
+		the awful living-room of God&#8212;is the neighborhood
+		of human life.</p>
+
+		<p>Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing
+		the soul it expresses the greatest idea
+		that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea
+		that the soul of man is infinite, or capable of
+		being infinite.</p>
+
+		<p>Machinery has poetry in it also not merely
+		because it is the symbol of infinite power in
+		human life, or because it makes man think he
+		is infinite, but because it is making him as infinite
+		as he thinks he is. The infinity of man is
+		no longer a thing that the poet takes&#8212;that he
+		makes an idea out of&#8212;Machinery makes it a
+		matter of fact.</p>
+
+	</div>
+	<div id="part_3_ch_3" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page84" name="page84"></a>84</span>III</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE</h3>
+		<p>The main thing the nineteenth century has
+		done in literature has been the gradual sorting
+		out of poets into two classes&#8212;those who like
+		the infinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and
+		those who have not. It seems reasonable to
+		say that the poets who have habits of infinity,
+		of space-conquering (like our vast machines),
+		who seek the suggestive and immeasurable in
+		the things they see about them&#8212;poets who like
+		infinity, will be the poets to whom we will have
+		to look to reveal to us the characteristic and
+		real poetry of this modern world. The other
+		poets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the
+		modern world, to say nothing of singing in it.
+		They do not feel at home in it. The classic-walled
+		poet seems to feel exposed in our world.
+		It is too savagely large, too various and unspeakable
+		and unfinished. He looks at the sky
+		of it&#8212;the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it,
+		to which it sings and lifts itself&#8212;with a strange,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page85" name="page85"></a>85</span>cold, hidden dread down in his heart. To him
+		it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness.
+		Its literature&#8212;its art with its infinite
+		life in it, is a blur of vagueness. He complains
+		because mobs of images are allowed in it.
+		It is full of huddled associations. When Carlyle
+		appeared, the Stucco-Greek mind grudgingly
+		admitted that he was &#8216;effective.&#8217; A man who
+		could use words as other men used things, who
+		could put a pen down on paper in such a way as
+		to lift men out from the boundaries of their lives
+		and make them live in other lives and in other
+		ages, who could lend them his own soul, had to
+		have something said about him; something very
+		good and so it was said, but he was not an
+		&#8220;artist.&#8221; From the same point of view and to
+		the same people Browning was a mere great
+		man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a
+		man who went about living and loving things,
+		with a few blind words opening the eyes of the
+		blind. It had to be admitted that Robert
+		Browning could make men who had never looked
+		at their brothers&#8217; faces dwell for days in their
+		souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner,
+		too, seer, lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of
+		his violins conquering a new heaven for us, had
+		great conceptions and was a musical genius
+		without the slightest doubt, but he was not an
+		&#8220;artist.&#8221; He never worked his conceptions out.
+		His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness.
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page86" name="page86"></a>86</span>They are nothing if they are not played again
+		and again. For twenty or thirty years Richard
+		Wagner was outlawed because his music was infinitely
+		unfinished (like the music of the spheres).
+		People seemed to want him to write cosy, homelike
+		music.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_3_ch_4" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page87" name="page87"></a>87</span>IV</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">SYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART</h3>
+		<div class="epigram">
+			<div class="poem">
+				<div class="stanza">
+					<p>&#8220;So I drop downward from the wonderment</p>
+					<p>Of timelessness and space, in which were blent</p>
+					<p>The wind, the sunshine and the wanderings</p>
+					<p>Of all the planets&#8212;to the little things</p>
+					<p>That are my grass and flowers, and am content.&#8221;</p>
+				</div>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<p>This prejudice against the infinite, or desire
+		to avoid as much as possible all personal
+		contact with it, betrays itself most commonly,
+		perhaps, in people who have what might be called
+		the domestic feeling, who consciously or unconsciously
+		demand the domestic touch in a
+		landscape before they are ready to call it beautiful.
+		The typical American woman, unless she
+		has unusual gifts or training, if she is left entirely
+		to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery.
+		Even if her imagination has been somewhat
+		cultivated and deepened, so that she feels that
+		a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in
+		order to be beautiful, she still chooses nooks
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page88" name="page88"></a>88</span>and ravines, as a rule, to be happy in&#8212;places
+		roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in
+		with beauty on every side. She is not without
+		her due respect and admiration for a mountain,
+		but she does not want it to be too large, or too
+		near the stars, if she has to live with it day and
+		night; and if the truth were told&#8212;even at its
+		best she finds a mountain distant, impersonal,
+		uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she
+		does not see beauty in the wide plain. There
+		is something in her being that makes her bashful
+		before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she
+		can snuggle up to. It is essentially the bird&#8217;s
+		taste in scenery. &#8220;Give me a nest, O Lord,
+		under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy
+		glory.&#8221; A bush or a tree with two or three
+		other bushes or trees near by, and just enough
+		sky to go with it&#8212;is it not enough?</p>
+
+		<p>The average man is like the average woman
+		in this regard except that he is less so. The
+		fact seems to be that the average human being
+		(like the average poet), at least for everyday
+		purposes, does not want any more of the world
+		around him than he can use, or than he can put
+		somewhere. If there is so much more of the
+		world than one can use, or than anyone else can
+		use, what is the possible object of living where
+		one cannot help being reminded of it?</p>
+
+		<p>The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle
+		persistent grudge against the infinite, shows
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page89" name="page89"></a>89</span>itself in the not uncommon prejudice against
+		pine trees. There are a great many people who
+		have a way of saying pleasant things about pine
+		trees and who like to drive through them or look
+		at them in the landscape or have them on other
+		people&#8217;s hills, but they would not plant a pine
+		tree near their houses or live with pines singing
+		over them and watching them, every day and
+		night, for the world. The mood of the pine is
+		such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious mood that
+		there are very few persons, no matter how dull or
+		unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are
+		not as much affected by a single pine, standing
+		in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole
+		skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite&#8212;they
+		do not want a whole treeful of it
+		around on the premises. And the pine comes
+		as near to being infinite as anything purely
+		vegetable, in a world like this, could expect.
+		It is the one tree of all others that profoundly
+		suggests, every time the light falls upon it or
+		the wind stirs through it, <span class="emphasized smaller_caps">the things that man
+		cannot touch</span>. Woven out of air and sunlight
+		and its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the
+		monument of the woods, to The Intangible, and
+		The Invisible, to the spirituality of matter. Who
+		shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit
+		of the pine? And who, who has ever looked
+		upon the pines&#8212;who has seen them climbing the
+		hills in crowds, drinking at the sun&#8212;has not felt
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page90" name="page90"></a>90</span>that however we may take to them personally
+		they are the Chosen People among the trees? To
+		pass from the voice of them to the voice of
+		the common leaves is to pass from the temple
+		to the street. In the rest of the forest all the
+		leaves seem to be full of one another&#8217;s din&#8212;of
+		rattle and chatter&#8212;heedless, happy chaos, but
+		in the pines the voice of every pine-spill is as a
+		chord in the voice of all the rest, and the whole
+		solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the
+		voice of the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical,
+		beautiful far-things that human spirits know
+		had come from the paths of Space, and from
+		the presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks
+		over our heads.</p>
+
+		<p>Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the
+		pine in the imagination is not that it is more
+		beautiful in itself than other trees, but that
+		the beauty of the pine seems more symbolic
+		than other beauty, and symbolic of more and of
+		greater things. It is full of the sturdiness and
+		strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the
+		tree to see the sky with, and its voice is the voice
+		of the horizons, the voice of the marriage of the
+		heavens and the earth; and not only is there
+		more of the sky in it, and more of the kingdom
+		of the air and of the place of Sleep, but there is
+		more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart
+		of the earth. No other tree can be mutilated
+		like the pine by the hand of man and still keep
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page91" name="page91"></a>91</span>a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty
+		about it and about all the place where it stands.
+		A whole row of them, with their left arms cut
+		off for passing wires, standing severe and stately,
+		their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help
+		being beautiful. The beauty is symbolic and
+		infinite. It cannot be taken away. If the entire
+		street-side of a row of common, ordinary
+		middle-class trees were cut away there would
+		be nothing to do with the maimed and helpless
+		things but to cut them down&#8212;remove their
+		misery from all men&#8217;s sight. To lop away the
+		half of a pine is only to see how beautiful the
+		other half is. The other half has the infinite in
+		it. However little of a pine is left it suggests
+		everything there is. It points to the universe
+		and beckons to the Night and the Day. The infinite
+		still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the
+		prophet of trees. In the sad lands it but grows
+		more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit of the
+		tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite&#8212;of
+		everywhere&#8212;wherever its shadow falls.
+		I have heard the sound of a hammer in the street
+		and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine
+		woods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud
+		catches the great empty spaces of night out of
+		heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers
+		all sound into itself&#8212;echoes it along the infinite.</p>
+
+		<p>The pine may be said to be the symbol of the
+		beauty in machinery, because it is beautiful the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page92" name="page92"></a>92</span>way an electric light is beautiful, or an electric-lighted
+		heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty
+		that belong to life: finite beauty, in that its
+		beauty can be seen in itself, and infinite beauty
+		in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of
+		the beauty that cannot be seen, the beauty
+		that dwells around it.</p>
+
+		<p>What is going to be called the typical power
+		of the colossal art, myriad-nationed, undreamed
+		of men before, now gathering in our modern
+		life, is its symbolic power, its power of standing
+		for more than itself.</p>
+
+		<p>Every great invention of modern mechanical
+		art and modern fine art has held within it an
+		extraordinary power of playing upon associations,
+		of playing upon the spirits and essences
+		of things until the outer senses are all gathered
+		up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were
+		meant to be melted, into inner ones. What is
+		wrought before the eyes of a man at last by a
+		great modern picture is not the picture that
+		fronts him on the wall, but a picture behind the
+		picture, painted with the flame of the heart on
+		the eternal part of him. It is the business of a
+		great modern work of art to bring a man face
+		to face with the greatness from which it came.
+		Millet&#8217;s Angelus is a portrait of the infinite,&#8212;and
+		a man and a woman. A picture with this
+		feeling of the infinite painted in it&#8212;behind it&#8212;which
+		produces this feeling of the infinite in
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page93" name="page93"></a>93</span>other men by playing upon the infinite in their
+		own lives, is a typical modern masterpiece.</p>
+
+		<p>The days when the infinite is not in our own
+		lives we do not see it. If the infinite is in our
+		own lives, and we do not like it there, we do
+		not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man,
+		or in a Corliss engine&#8212;a picture of the face of
+		All-Man, mastering the earth&#8212;silent&#8212;lifted to
+		heaven.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_3_ch_5" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page94" name="page94"></a>94</span>V</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS</h3>
+		<p>It is not necessary, in order to connect a railway
+		train with the infinite, to see it steaming
+		along a low sky and plunging into a huge white
+		hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite
+		as infinite flying through granite in Hoosac
+		Mountain. Most people who do not think there
+		is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with
+		flying through granite as a trait of the infinite in
+		a locomotive, and yet these same people, if a
+		locomotive could be lifted bodily to where infinity
+		is or is supposed to be (up in the sky
+		somewhere)&#8212;if they could watch one night after
+		night plowing through planets&#8212;would want a
+		poem written about it at once.</p>
+
+		<p>A man who has a theory he does not see poetry
+		in a locomotive, does not see it because theoretically
+		he does not connect it with infinite things:
+		the things that poetry is usually about. The
+		idea that the infinite is not cooped up in heaven,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page95" name="page95"></a>95</span>that it can be geared and run on a track (and be
+		all the more infinite for not running off the
+		track), does not occur to him. The first thing
+		he does when he is told to look for the infinite
+		in the world is to stop and think a moment,
+		where he is, and then look for it somewhere
+		else.</p>
+
+		<p>It would seem to be the first idea of the infinite,
+		in being infinite, not to be anywhere else.
+		It could not be anywhere else if it tried; and if a
+		locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in
+		and out of the fiber of the earth and of the lives
+		of men, the infinity and poetry in it are a matter
+		of course. I like to think that it is merely a
+		matter of seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing
+		it in enough of its actual relations as it is,
+		to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the
+		order, the energy, and the restfulness of the
+		whole universe are pulsing there through its
+		wheels.</p>
+
+		<p>The times when we do not feel poetry in a
+		locomotive are the times when we are not matter-of-fact
+		enough. We do not see it in enough of its
+		actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough
+		is all that makes anything poetic. Everything
+		in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as the symbol,
+		the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded
+		symbol of everything else in the universe&#8212;the
+		summing up of everything else&#8212;another whisper
+		of God&#8217;s.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page96" name="page96"></a>96</span>Have I not seen the great Sun Itself, from
+		out of its huge heaven, packed in a seed and
+		blown about on a wind? I have seen the leaves
+		of the trees drink all night from the stars, and
+		when I have listened with my soul&#8212;thousands
+		of years&#8212;I have heard The Night and The Day
+		creeping softly through mountains. People
+		called it geology.</p>
+
+		<p>It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by
+		going to the infinite, he is going to be infinite
+		where he is. He is carving it on the hills, tunneling
+		it through the rocks of the earth, piling
+		it up on the crust of it, with winds and waters
+		and flame and steel he is writing it on all things&#8212;that
+		he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The
+		whole planet is his signature.</p>
+
+		<p>If what the modern man is trying to say in
+		his modern age is his own infinity, it naturally
+		follows that the only way a modern artist can
+		be a great artist in a modern age is to say in that
+		age that man is infinite, better than any one else
+		is saying it.</p>
+
+		<p>The best way to express this infinity of man is
+		to seek out the things in the life of the man
+		which are the symbols of his infinity&#8212;which
+		suggest his infinity the most&#8212;and then play on
+		those symbols and let those symbols play on
+		him. In other words the poet&#8217;s program is something
+		like this. The modern age means the
+		infinity of man. Modern art means symbolism
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page97" name="page97"></a>97</span>of man&#8217;s infinity. The best symbol of the
+		man&#8217;s infinity the poet can find, in this world
+		the man has made, is The Machine.</p>
+
+		<p>At least it seems so to me. I was looking out
+		of my study window down the long track in the
+		meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud
+		floating its train out of sight. A high wind
+		was driving, and in long wavering folds the cloud
+		lay down around the train. It was like a great
+		Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour.
+		For a moment it almost seemed that, instead
+		of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud propelling
+		a train&#8212;wing of a thousand tons. I have
+		often before seen a broken fog towing a mountain,
+		but never have I seen before, a train of cars
+		with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping
+		from its whistle. Of course the train out
+		in my meadow, with its pillar of fire by night and
+		of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing
+		new; neither is the tower of steam when it
+		stands still of a winter morning building pyramids,
+		nor the long, low cloud creeping back on
+		the car-tops and scudding away in the light;
+		but this mad and splendid Thing of Whiteness
+		and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this
+		ghost of a train&#8212;soul or look in the eyes of it,
+		haunting it, gathering it all up, steel and thunder,
+		into itself, catching it away into heaven&#8212;was
+		one of the most magical and stirring sights
+		I have seen for a long time. It came to me like
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page98" name="page98"></a>98</span>a kind of Zeit-geist or passing of the spirit of the
+		age.</p>
+
+		<p>When I looked again it was old 992 from the
+		roundhouse escorting Number Eight to Springfield.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_3_ch_6" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page99" name="page99"></a>99</span>VI</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS</h3>
+
+		<p>If we could go into History as we go into a
+		theatre, take our seats quietly, ring up the
+		vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then
+		could watch it&#8212;all those far off queer happy
+		people living before our eyes, two or three
+		hours&#8212;living with their new inventions and
+		their last wonders all about them, they would
+		not seem to us, probably to know why
+		they were happy. They would merely be
+		living along with their new things from day to
+		day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.</p>
+
+		<p>Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories
+		for poems have to be arranged after we have
+		had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery
+		seems to be to every man&#8217;s personal everyday
+		instinct and experience. We have, most
+		of the time, neither words nor theories for it.</p>
+
+		<p>I do not think that our case must stand or
+		fall with our theory. But there is something
+		comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page100" name="page100"></a>100</span>permission to let ones self go&#8212;makes it seem
+		more respectable to enjoy things. So I suggest
+		something&#8212;the one I have used when I felt I
+		had to have one. I have partitioned it off by
+		itself and it can be skipped.</p>
+
+		<p>1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its
+		Idea.</p>
+		<p>2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion
+		as its form reveals the nature of its substance,
+		that is, conveys its idea.</p>
+		<p>3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable
+		ideas consummately expressed.</p>
+		<p>4. Machinery has poetry in it because the
+		three immeasurable ideas expressed by machinery
+		are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry
+		and of the imagination and the soul&#8212;infinity
+		and the two forms of infinity, the liberty and
+		the unity of man.</p>
+		<p>5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately
+		expressed by machinery because machinery
+		expresses them in the only way that
+		immeasurable ideas can ever be expressed: (1)
+		by literally doing the immeasurable things, (2)
+		by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man
+		who is in the mood of looking at it with his
+		whole being, the machine is beautiful because it
+		is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world
+		contains of the infinity of his own life, and of
+		the liberty and unity of all men&#8217;s lives, which
+		slowly, out of the passion of history is now
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page101" name="page101"></a>101</span>being wrought out before our eyes upon the
+		face of the earth.</p>
+		<p>6. It is only from the point of view of a
+		nightingale or a sonnet that the Ʀsthetic form
+		of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be criticised
+		as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing
+		with immeasurable ideas are finished forms the
+		more symbolic and speechless they are; the more
+		they invoke the imagination and make it build
+		out on God, and upon the Future, and upon
+		Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and
+		satisfying they are.</p>
+		<p>7. The first great artist a modern or machine
+		age can have, will be the man who brings out
+		for it the ideas behind its machines. These
+		ideas&#8212;the ones the machines are daily playing
+		over and about the lives of all of us&#8212;might be
+		stated roughly as follows:</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>The idea of the incarnation&#8212;the god in the body of the man.</p>
+				<p>The idea of liberty&#8212;the soul&#8217;s rescue from others.</p>
+				<p>The idea of unity&#8212;the soul&#8217;s rescue from its mere self.</p>
+				<p>The idea of the Spirit&#8212;the Unseen and Intangible.</p>
+				<p>The idea of immortality.</p>
+				<p>The cosmic idea of God.</p>
+				<p>The practical idea of invoking great men.</p>
+				<p>The religious idea of love and comradeship.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p>And nearly every other idea that makes of
+		itself a song or a prayer in the human spirit.</p>
+	</div>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page102" name="page102"></a>102</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<div id="Part_IV" class="part">
+	<p class="part_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page103" name="page103"></a>103</span>PART FOUR</p>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page104" name="page104"></a>104</span></p>
+	<h2 class="part_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page105" name="page105"></a>105</span>IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES</h2>
+	<div id="part_4_ch_1" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number">I</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF INCARNATION</h3>
+		<div class="epigram">
+			<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+			<p>&#8220;I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+			<p>And found it not&#8212;but many things beside;</p>
+			<p>Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.</p>
+			<p>And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+			<p>Then wandering upward through the solid earth</p>
+			<p>With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,</p>
+			<p>I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+			<p>And thus addressed Him: &#8216;All of you that lie</p>
+			<p>Safe in the dust or ride along the sky&#8212;</p>
+			<p>Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+			</div>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<p>The grasshopper may be called the poet of
+		the insects. He has more hop for his
+		size than any of the others. I am very fond of
+		watching him&#8212;especially of watching those
+		two enormous beams of his that loom up on
+		either side of his body. They have always
+		seemed to me one of the great marvels of mechanics.
+		By knowing how to use them, he
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page106" name="page106"></a>106</span>jumps forty times his own length. A man who
+		could contrive to walk as well as any ordinary
+		grasshopper does (and without half trying)
+		could make two hundred and fifty feet at a
+		step. There is no denying, of course, that the
+		man does it, after his fashion, but he has to
+		have a trolley to do it with. The man seems
+		to prefer, as a rule, to use things outside to get
+		what he wants inside. He has a way of making
+		everything outside him serve him as if he had it
+		on his own body&#8212;uses a whole universe every
+		day without the trouble of always having to
+		carry it around with him. He gets his will out
+		of the ground and even out of the air. He lays
+		hold of the universe and makes arms and legs
+		out of it. If he wants at any time, for any reason,
+		more body than he was made with, he has his
+		soul reach out over or around the planet a
+		little farther and draw it in for him.</p>
+
+		<p>The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not
+		differ from the man in that he has a soul and
+		body both, but his soul and body seem to be
+		perfectly matched. He has his soul and body
+		all on. It is probably the best (and the worst)
+		that can be said of a grasshopper&#8217;s soul, if he
+		has one, that it is in his legs&#8212;that he really
+		has his wits about him.</p>
+
+		<p>Looked at superficially, or from the point of
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page107" name="page107"></a>107</span>view of the next hop, it can hardly be denied
+		that the body the human soul has been fitted
+		out with is a rather inferior affair. From the
+		point of view of any respectable or ordinarily
+		well-equipped animal the human body&#8212;the one
+		accorded to the average human being in the
+		great show of creation&#8212;almost looks sometimes
+		as if God really must have made it as a kind of
+		practical joke, in the presence of the other animals,
+		on the rest of us. It looks as if He had
+		suddenly decided at the very moment he was
+		in the middle of making a body for a man, that
+		out of all the animals man should be immortal&#8212;and
+		had let it go at that. With the exception
+		of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or
+		camel and an extra fold or so in the hippopotamus,
+		we are easily the strangest, the most
+		unexplained-looking shape on the face of the
+		earth. It is exceedingly unlikely that we are
+		beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to any
+		one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do
+		with our hands and feet, any animal on earth
+		could tell us, are things we do not do as well as
+		men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as
+		well as we did when we were born. Our very
+		babies are our superiors.</p>
+
+		<p>The only defence we are able to make when
+		we are arraigned before the bar of creation,
+		seems to be, that while some of the powers we
+		have exhibited have been very obviously lost,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page108" name="page108"></a>108</span>we have gained some very fine new invisible
+		ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all,&#8212;our
+		nerves, for instance,&#8212;the mentalized
+		condition of our organs. And then, of course,
+		there is the superior quality of our gray matter.
+		When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in
+		this pathetic way from the judgment of the
+		brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on
+		looking at us in the mere ordinary, observing,
+		scientific, realistic fashion, we hint at our mysteriousness&#8212;a
+		kind of mesh of mysticism there
+		is in us. We tell them it cannot really be seen
+		from the outside, how well our bodies work.
+		We do not put it in so many words, but what
+		we mean is, that we need to be cut up to be
+		appreciated, or seen in the large, or in our more
+		infinite relations. Our matter may not be very
+		well arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter
+		ourselves that there is a superior unseen spiritual
+		quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to
+		appreciate us&#8212;more of the same sort, etc. In
+		the meantime (no man can deny the way things
+		look) here we all are, with our queer, pale, little
+		stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering
+		about on this earth, without even our
+		clothes on, covering ourselves as best we can.
+		And what could really be funnier than a human
+		body living before The Great Sun under its
+		frame of wood and glass, all winter and all
+		summer &#8230; strange and bleached-looking,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page109" name="page109"></a>109</span>like celery, grown almost always under cloth,
+		kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it
+		likes for itself, moving about or being moved
+		about, the way it is, in thousands of queer,
+		dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth,
+		we can well believe, as we go up and down in
+		it is full of soft laughter at us. One cannot so
+		much as go in swimming without feeling the
+		fishes peeking around the rocks, getting their
+		fun out of us in some still, underworld sort of
+		way. We cannot help&#8212;a great many of us&#8212;feeling,
+		in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed
+		in the woods. Most of us, it is true,
+		manage to keep up a look of being fairly at
+		home on the planet by huddling up and living
+		in cities. By dint of staying carefully away
+		from the other animals, keeping pretty much
+		by ourselves, and whistling a good deal and
+		making a great deal of noise, called civilization,
+		we keep each other in countenance after a
+		fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal
+		world, and when we stop to think of it and face
+		the facts and see ourselves as the others see us,
+		we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one,
+		rather like to, and have it done with.</p>
+
+		<p>It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures
+		now, as I go up and down the world,&#8212;looking
+		upon the man&#8217;s body,&#8212;the little funny one that
+		he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul
+		and looking upon the one that he really has.
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page110" name="page110"></a>110</span>When one considers what a man actually does,
+		where he really lives, one sees very plainly that
+		all that he has been allowed is a mere suggestion
+		or hint of a body, a sort of central nerve or
+		ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of
+		infinity, blown down on a star&#8212;held there by
+		the grip, apparently, of Nothing&#8212;a human body
+		is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There
+		is something indescribably helpless and wistful
+		and reaching out and incomplete about it&#8212;a
+		body made to pray with, perhaps, one might
+		say, but not for action. All that it really comes
+		to or is for, apparently, is a kind of light there
+		is in it.</p>
+
+		<p>But the sea is its footpath. The light that
+		is in it is the same light that reaches down to
+		the central fires of the earth. It flames upon
+		heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it
+		is, when I look upon it, I have seen the animals
+		slinking to their holes before it, and worshipping,
+		or following the light that is in it. The
+		great waters and the great lights flock to it&#8212;this
+		beckoning and a prayer for a body, which
+		the man has.</p>
+
+		<p>I go into the printing room of a great newspaper.
+		In a single flash of black and white the
+		press flings down the world for him&#8212;birth,
+		death, disgrace, honor and war and farce and
+		love and death, sea and hills, and the days on
+		the other side of the world. Before the dawn
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page111" name="page111"></a>111</span>
+		the papers are carried forth. They hasten on
+		glimmering trains out through the dark. Soon
+		the newsboys shrill in the streets&#8212;China and
+		the Philippines and Australia, and East and
+		West they cry&#8212;the voices of the nations of the
+		earth, and in my soul I worship the body of
+		the man. Have I not seen two trains full of the
+		will of the body of the man meet at full speed
+		in the darkness of the night? I have watched
+		them on the trembling ground&#8212;the flash of
+		light, the crash of power, ninety miles an hour
+		twenty inches apart, &#8230; thundering aisles
+		of souls &#8230; on into blackness, and in my
+		soul I worship the body of the man.</p>
+
+		<p>And when I go forth at night, feel the earth
+		walking silently across heaven beneath my feet,
+		I know that the heart-beat and the will of the
+		man is in it&#8212;in all of it. With thousands of
+		trains under it, over it, around it, he thrills it
+		through with his will. I no longer look, since
+		I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon
+		the countenance of the hills, nor feel the earth
+		around me growing softly or resting in the
+		light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that
+		reaches out around me, is the body of the man.
+		One must look up to stars and beyond horizons
+		to look in his face. Who is there, I have said,
+		that shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of
+		this body, all wireless telegraph and steel, or
+		know the sound of its going? Now, when I see
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page112" name="page112"></a>112</span>it, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth.
+		Like a low thunder it reaches around the crust
+		of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle body
+		(oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over
+		the hill of the sea, soft and stately as the walking
+		of the clouds in the upper air.</p>
+
+		<p>Is there any one to-day so small as to know
+		where he is? I am always coming suddenly
+		upon my body, crying out with joy like a child
+		in the dark, &#8220;And I am here, too!&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>Has the twentieth century, I have wondered,
+		a man in it who shall feel Himself?</p>
+
+		<p>And so it has come to pass, this vision I have
+		seen with my own eyes&#8212;Man, my Brother, with
+		his mean, absurd little unfinished body, going
+		triumphant up and down the earth making
+		limbs of Time and Space. Who is there who
+		has not seen it, if only through the peephole of
+		a dream&#8212;the whole earth lying still and strange
+		in the hollow of his hand, the sea waiting upon
+		him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the
+		whole earth with a look, wrapped white and
+		still in its ball of mist, the glint of the Atlantic
+		on it, and in the blue place the vision of the
+		ships.</p>
+		<div class="poem">
+		<div class="stanza">
+		<p>Between the seas and skies</p>
+		<p>The Shuttle flies</p>
+		<p>Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep,</p>
+		<p>Thousand-sailed,</p>
+		<p>Half in waking, half in sleep.</p>
+		</div>
+
+		<div class="stanza">
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page113" name="page113"></a>113</span>Glistening calms and shouting gales</p>
+		<p>Water-gold and green,</p>
+		<p>And many a heavenly-minded blue</p>
+		<p>It thrusts and shudders through,</p>
+		<p>Past my starlight,</p>
+		<p>Past the glow of suns I know,</p>
+		<p>Weaving fates,</p>
+		<p>Loves and hates</p>
+		<p>In the Sea&#8212;</p>
+		<p>The stately Shuttle</p>
+		<p>To and fro,</p>
+		<p>Mast by mast,</p>
+		<p>Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.</p>
+		<p>Flights of Days and Nights</p>
+		<p>Flies fast.</p>
+		</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p>It may be true, as the poets are telling us,
+		that this fashion the modern man has, of reaching
+		out with steel and vapor and smoke, and
+		holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry
+		in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for
+		poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself.
+		I have seen the few poets of this modern
+		world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster
+		Abbey), and I have seen also a great
+		foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing
+		the bodies and the souls of men around the
+		world, beating out the floors of cities, making
+		the limbs of the great ships silently striding the
+		sea, and rolling out the roads of continents.</p>
+
+		<p>If this is not poetry, it is because it is too
+		great a vision. And yet there are times I am
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page114" name="page114"></a>114</span>inclined to think when it brushes against us&#8212;against
+		all of us. We feel Something there.
+		More than once I have almost touched the edge
+		of it. Then I have looked to see the man wondering
+		at it. But he puts up his hands to his
+		eyes, or he is merely hammering on something.
+		Then I wish that some one would be born for
+		him, and write a book for him, a book that
+		should come upon the man and fold him in like
+		a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is.
+		He ought to have a book that shall be to him
+		like a whole Age&#8212;the one he lives in, coming
+		to him and leaning over him, whispering to him,
+		&#8220;Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold
+		thy hands and thy feet?&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>The trains like spirits flock to him.</p>
+
+		<p>There are days when I can read a time-table.
+		When I put it back in my pocket it sings.</p>
+
+		<p>In the time-table I carry in my pocket I
+		unfold the earth.</p>
+
+		<p>I have come to despise poets and dreams.
+		Truths have made dreams pale and small.
+		What is wanted now is some man who is literal
+		enough to tell the truth.</p>
+
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_2" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page115" name="page115"></a>115</span>II</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF SIZE</h3>
+		<p>Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that
+		the other readers of Mount Tom (besides me)
+		may not be so tremendously interested after all
+		in machinery and interpretations of machinery.
+		Perhaps they are merely being polite about the
+		subject while up here with me on the mountain,
+		not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking
+		back. It is really no place for talking back, perhaps
+		they think, on a mountain. But the trouble
+		is, I get more interested than other people
+		before I know it. Then suddenly it occurs to me
+		to wonder if they are listening particularly and
+		are not looking off at the scenery and the river
+		and the hills and the meadow while I wander
+		on about railroad trains and symbolism and the
+		Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity
+		and Schopenhauer and the other things,
+		tracking out relations. It gets worse than other
+		people&#8217;s genealogies.</p>
+
+		<p>But all I ask is, that when they come, as they
+		are coming now, just over the page to some
+		more of these machine ideas, or interpretations
+		as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page116" name="page116"></a>116</span>with engines, they will not drop the matter altogether.
+		They may not feel as I do. It would
+		be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps,
+		if I could be agreed with by everybody; but
+		boring people is a serious matter&#8212;boring them
+		all the time, I mean. It&#8217;s no more than fair,
+		of course, that the subscribers to a magazine
+		should run some of the risk&#8212;as well as the
+		editor&#8212;but I do like to think that in these
+		next few pages there are&#8212;spots, and that
+		people will keep hopeful.</p>
+
+		<p class="large_thought_break">Some people are very fond of looking up at
+		the sky, taking it for a regular exercise, and
+		thinking how small they are. It relieves them.
+		I do not wish to deny that there is a certain
+		luxury in it. But I must say that for all
+		practical purposes of a mind&#8212;of having a mind&#8212;I
+		would be willing to throw over whole hours and
+		days of feeling very small, any time, for a single
+		minute of feeling big. The details are more
+		interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of
+		glittering generality.</p>
+
+		<p>I do not think I am altogether unaware how
+		I look from a star&#8212;at least I have spent days
+		and nights practising with a star, looking down
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page117" name="page117"></a>117</span>from it on the thing I have agreed for the time
+		being (whatever it is) to call myself, and I
+		have discovered that the real luxury for me does
+		not consist in feeling very small or even in
+		feeling very large. The luxury for me is in
+		having a regular reliable feeling, every day of
+		my life, that I have been made on purpose&#8212;and
+		very conveniently made, to be infinitely small
+		or infinitely large as I like. I arrange it any
+		time. I find myself saying one minute, &#8220;Are
+		not the whole human race my house-servants?
+		Is not London my valet&#8212;always at my door to
+		do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me.
+		It takes a world to make room for my body.
+		My soul is furnished with other worlds I cannot
+		see.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>The next minute I find myself saying nothing.
+		The whole star I am on is a bit of pale yellow
+		down floating softly through space. What I
+		really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling.
+		Whether I am small or large all space cannot
+		help waiting upon me&#8212;now that I have taken
+		iron and vapor and light and made hands for
+		my hands, millions of them, and reached out
+		with them. A little one shall become a thousand.
+		I have abolished all size&#8212;even my own
+		size does not exist. If all the work that is being
+		done by the hands of my hands had literally to
+		be done by men, there would not be standing
+		room for them on the globe&#8212;comfortable
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page118" name="page118"></a>118</span>standing room. But even though, as it happens,
+		much of the globe is not very good to stand on,
+		and vast tracts of it, every year, are going to
+		waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing
+		we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we
+		like. As long as a young woman can sit down
+		by a loom which is as good as six hundred more
+		just like her, and all in a few square feet&#8212;as
+		long as we can do up the whole of one of Napoleon&#8217;s
+		armies in a ball of dynamite, or stable
+		twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean
+		steamer, it does not make very much difference
+		what kind of a planet we are on, or how large or
+		small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems
+		as if it were all used up and things look cramped
+		again (which they do once in so often) we
+		have but to think of something, invent something,
+		and let it out a little. We move over into
+		a new world in a minute. Columbus was mere
+		bagatelle. We get continents every few days.
+		Thousands of men are thinking of them&#8212;adding
+		them on. Mere size is getting to be old-fashioned&#8212;as
+		a way of arranging things. It has never
+		been a very big earth&#8212;at best&#8212;the way God
+		made it first. He made a single spider that
+		could weave a rope out of her own body around
+		it. It can be ticked all through, and all around,
+		with the thoughts of a man. The universe
+		has been put into a little telescope and the oceans
+		into a little compass. Alice in Wonderland&#8217;s
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page119" name="page119"></a>119</span>romantic and clever way with a pill is become the
+		barest matter of fact. Looking at the world
+		a single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite,
+		no one who has ever been on it&#8212;before&#8212;would
+		know it. It&#8217;s as if the world were a little
+		wizened balloon that had been given us once
+		and had been used so for thousands of years,
+		and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_3" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page120" name="page120"></a>120</span>III</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF LIBERTY</h3>
+		<p>Some one told me one morning not so very
+		long ago that the sun was getting a mile
+		smaller across every ten years. It gave me a
+		shut-in and helpless feeling. I found myself
+		several times during that day looking at it
+		anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to
+		warm them. I knew in a vague fashion that
+		it would last long enough for me. And a mile
+		in ten years was not much. It did not take
+		much figuring to see that I had not the slightest
+		reason to be anxious. But my feelings were hurt.
+		I felt as if something had hit the universe. I
+		could not get myself&#8212;and I have not been
+		able to get myself since&#8212;to look at it impersonally.
+		I suppose every man lives in
+		some theory of the universe, unconsciously,
+		every day, as much as he lives in the sunlight.
+		And he does not want it disturbed. I have
+		always felt safe before. And, what was a necessary
+		part of safety with me, I have felt that
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page121" name="page121"></a>121</span>history was safe&#8212;that there was going to be
+		enough of it.</p>
+
+		<p>I have been in the world a good pleasant
+		while on the whole, tried it and got used to it&#8212;used
+		to the weather on it and used to having
+		my friends hate me and my enemies turn on
+		me and love me, and the other uncertainties; but
+		all the time, when I looked up at the sun and
+		saw it, or thought of it down under the world,
+		I counted on it. I discovered that my soul
+		had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum for
+		all things. I helped God lift with it. It was
+		obvious that it was going to be harder for both
+		of us&#8212;a mere matter of time. I could not get
+		myself used to the thought. Every fresh look
+		I took at the sun peeling off mile after mile up
+		there, as fast as I lived, flustered me&#8212;made
+		my sky less useful to me, less convenient to
+		rest in. I found myself trying slowly to see
+		how this universe would look&#8212;what it would be
+		like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody
+		would have to be. It would be necessary to
+		justify things for him. He would probably be
+		too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.</p>
+
+		<p>I had a good deal the same experience with
+		Mount PelƩe last summer. I resented being
+		cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.</p>
+
+		<p>The fact that it leaked several thousand miles
+		away, and had made a comparatively safe hole
+		for it, out in the middle of the sea, only afforded
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page122" name="page122"></a>122</span>momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper
+		than that. It could not be remedied by a mere
+		applying long distances to it. It was underneath
+		down in my soul. Time and Space
+		could not get at it. The feeling that I had been
+		trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could
+		not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been
+		deliberately taken body and soul, without my
+		knowing it and without my ever having been
+		asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder
+		to live, whether I wanted to or not&#8212;the sudden
+		new appalling sense I had, that the ground
+		underneath my feet was not really good and
+		solid, that I was living every day of my life
+		just over a roar of great fire, that I was
+		being asked (and everybody else) to make
+		history and build stone houses, and found institutions
+		and things on the bare outside&#8212;the
+		destroyed and ruined part of a ball that had
+		been tossed out in space to burn itself up&#8212;the
+		sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust
+		I live on, or bit of caked ashes, was liable to
+		break through suddenly at any time and pour
+		down the center of the earth on one&#8217;s head,
+		did not add to the dignity, it seemed to me, or
+		the self-respect of human life. &#8220;You might as
+		well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount
+		PelƩe in the face,&#8221; I tried to say coldly and
+		calmly to myself. &#8220;Here you are, set down
+		helplessly among stars, on a great round blue
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page123" name="page123"></a>123</span>and green something all fire and wind inside.
+		And it is all liable&#8212;this superficial crust or
+		geological ice you are on&#8212;perfectly liable, at
+		any time or any place after this, to let through
+		suddenly and dump all the nations and all
+		ancient and modern history, and you and Your
+		Book, into this awful ceaseless abyss&#8212;of boiled
+		mountains and stewed up continents that is
+		seething beneath your feet.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an
+		optimist on the edge of this earth as it is, to
+		keep on believing in people and things on it,
+		without having to believe besides that the earth
+		is a huge round swindle just of itself, going round
+		and round through all heaven, with all of us
+		on it, laughing at us.</p>
+
+		<p>I felt chilled through for a long time after
+		Mount PelƩe broke out. I went wistfully about
+		sitting in sunny and windless places trying to
+		get warmed all summer. And it was not all in
+		my soul. It was not all subjective. I noticed
+		that the thermometer was caught the same way.
+		It was a plain case enough&#8212;it seemed to me&#8212;the
+		heater I lived on had let through, spilled out
+		and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground
+		simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat
+		in the sun and pictured the earth freezing itself
+		up slowly and deliberately, on the outside. I
+		had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the
+		world was not coming as the ancients saw it,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page124" name="page124"></a>124</span>by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the fires
+		going out. A mile off the sun every ten years
+		(this for the loss of outside heat) and volcanoes
+		and things (for the inside heat), and gradually
+		between being frozen under us, and frozen over
+		us, both, both sides at once, the human race
+		would face the situation. We would have to
+		learn to live together. Any one could see that.
+		The human race was going to be one long row,
+		sometime&#8212;great nations of us and little ones
+		all at last huddled up along the equator to keep
+		warm. Just outside of this a little way, it
+		would be perfectly empty star, all in a swirl of
+		snowdrifts.</p>
+
+		<p>I do not claim that it was very scientific to
+		feel in this way, but I have always had, ever
+		since I can remember, a moderate or decent
+		human interest in the universe as a universe,
+		and I had always felt as if the earth had made,
+		for all practical purposes, a sort of contract with
+		the human race, and when it acted like this&#8212;cooled
+		itself off all of a sudden, in the middle of
+		a hot summer, and all to show off a comparatively
+		unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an
+		island far out at sea&#8212;I could not conceal from
+		myself (in my present and usual capacity as a
+		kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that
+		there was something distinctly jarring about it
+		and disrespectful. I felt as if we had been
+		trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page125" name="page125"></a>125</span>long&#8212;this injured feeling toward the universe
+		in behalf of the man in it, but I could not help it
+		at first. There grew an anger within me and
+		then out of the anger a great delight. It seemed
+		to me I saw my soul standing afar off down
+		there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.</p>
+
+		<p>Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had
+		always had. I was standing as I had always
+		stood on an earth before, be it a bare or flowering
+		one. I saw myself standing before all that was.
+		Then I defied the heaven over my head and
+		the ground under my feet not to keep me strong
+		and glad before God. I saw that it mattered
+		not to me, of an earth, how bare it was, or could
+		be, or could be made to be; if the soul of a man
+		could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness
+		would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking
+		of the man. I took an inventory down in my
+		being of all that the man was, of the might of
+		the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything
+		new to the man to be maltreated, a little,
+		neglected&#8212;almost outwitted by a universe?
+		Had he not already, thousands of times in the
+		history of this planet, flung his spirit upon the
+		cold, and upon empty space&#8212;and made homes
+		out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He
+		had entered the place of the mighty heat and
+		made the coolness of shadow out of it.</p>
+
+		<p>It was nothing new. The planet had always
+		been a little queer. It was when it commenced.
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page126" name="page126"></a>126</span>The only difference would seem to be that, instead
+		of having the earth at first the way it is
+		going to be by and by apparently&#8212;an earth
+		with a little rim of humanity around it, great
+		nations toeing the equator to live&#8212;everything
+		was turned around. All the young nations
+		might have been seen any day crowded around
+		the ends or tips of the earth to keep from falling
+		into the fire that was still at work on the middle
+		of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to have
+		things happen on it. Boys might have been
+		seen almost any afternoon, in those early days,
+		going out to the north pole and playing duck
+		on the rock to keep from being too warm.</p>
+
+		<p>It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste&#8212;the
+		way a planet acts at any given time. Now it
+		is one way and now another, and we do as we
+		like.</p>
+
+		<p>I do not pretend to say in so many words if
+		the sun grew feeble, just what the man would
+		do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he
+		would make some kind of summer out of them.
+		One cannot help feeling that if the sun went out,
+		it would be because he wanted it to&#8212;had arranged
+		something, if nothing but a good bit of
+		philosophy. It is not likely that the man has
+		defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries
+		for nothing. The things they have
+		done against him have been the making of him.
+		When he found this same sun we are talking
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page127" name="page127"></a>127</span>about, in the earliest days of all, was a sun
+		that kept running away from him and left him
+		in a great darkness half of every day he lived,
+		he knew what to do. Every time that Heaven
+		has done anything to him, he has had his answer
+		ready. The man who finds himself on a planet
+		that is only lighted part of the time, is merely
+		reminded that he must think of something. He
+		digs light out of the ground and glows up the
+		world with her own sap. When he finds himself
+		living on an earth that can only be said to be
+		properly heated a small fraction of the year,
+		he makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep
+		him warm. Things like this are small to us.
+		We put coal through a desire and take the breath
+		out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook
+		our food with poisons. We take water and burn
+		it into air and we telegraph boilers, and flash
+		mills around the earth on poles. We move
+		vast machines with a little throb, like light. We
+		put a street on a wire. Great crowds in the
+		great cities&#8212;whole blocks of them&#8212;are handed
+		along day and night like dots and dashes in
+		telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a
+		breath. We save a man up in his own whisper
+		hundreds of years when he is dead. A human
+		voice that reaches only a few yards makes
+		thousands of miles of copper talk. Then we
+		make the thousand miles talk without the
+		copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page128" name="page128"></a>128</span>the air with a thought thousands of miles away&#8212;make
+		it whisper for us to ships. One need
+		not fear for a man like this&#8212;a man who has
+		made all the earth a deed, an action of his own
+		soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the
+		waste of heaven and made words out of it. One
+		cannot but believe that a man like this is a free
+		man. Let what will happen to the sun that
+		warms him or the star that seems just now his
+		foothold in space. All shall be as his soul says
+		when his soul determines what it shall say.
+		Fire and wind and cold&#8212;when his soul speaks&#8212;and
+		Invisibility itself and Nothing are his
+		servants.</p>
+
+		<p>The vision of a little helpless human race
+		huddled in the tropics saying its last prayers,
+		holding up its face to a far-off neglected-looking
+		universe, warming its hands at the stars&#8212;the
+		vision of all the great peoples of the earth
+		squeezed up into Esquimaux, in furs up to their
+		eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep
+		warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set
+		of scientists gloats on giving us. One needs but
+		to look for what the other set is saying. It has
+		not time to be saying much, but what it practically
+		says is: &#8220;Let the sun wizen up if it
+		wants to. There will be something. Somebody
+		will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing
+		suns. At all events to a real man any
+		little accident or bruise to the planet he&#8217;s on
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page129" name="page129"></a>129</span>is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some
+		new beautiful impossibility&#8212;if the truth were
+		known&#8212;is just what we are looking for.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>A human race which makes its car wheels
+		and napkins out of paper, its street pavements
+		out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,
+		which draws food out of air, which winds up
+		operas on spools, which has its way with oceans,
+		and plays chess with the empty ether that is
+		over the sea&#8212;which makes clouds speak with
+		tongues, which lights railway trains with pin-wheels
+		and which makes its cars go by stopping
+		them, and heats its furnaces with smoke&#8212;it
+		would be very strange if a race like this could
+		not find some way at least of managing its own
+		planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though
+		it be) some way of warming it, or of melting off
+		a place to live on. A corporation was formed
+		down in New Jersey the other day to light a
+		city by the tossing of the waves. We are
+		always getting some new grasp&#8212;giving some
+		new sudden almost humorous stretch to matter.
+		We keep nature fairly smiling at herself. One
+		can hardly tell, when one hears of half the
+		new things nowadays&#8212;actual facts&#8212;whether to
+		laugh or cry, or form a stock company or break
+		out into singing. No one would dare to say that
+		a thousand years from now we will not have
+		found some other use for moonlight than for
+		love affairs and to haul tides with. We will
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page130" name="page130"></a>130</span>be manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed
+		starlight, and heating houses with it. It will
+		be peddled about the streets like milk, from
+		door to door in cases and bottles.</p>
+
+		<p>First and last, whatever else may be said of us,
+		we do as we like with a planet. Nothing it can
+		do to us, nothing that can happen to it, outwits
+		us&#8212;at least more than a few hundred years
+		at a time. The idea that we cannot even keep
+		warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be
+		more likely&#8212;almost any time now&#8212;than for
+		some one to decide that we ought to have our
+		continents warmed more, winters. It would
+		not be much, as things are going, to remodel the
+		floors of a few of our continents&#8212;put in registers
+		and things, have the heat piped up from the
+		center of the earth. The best way to get a
+		faint idea of what science is going to be like
+		the next few thousand years, is to pick out
+		something that could not possibly be so and
+		believe it. We manufacture ice in July by
+		boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet as we
+		want to&#8212;at least a few furnished continents&#8212;with
+		hot things, we will do it with cold ones, or
+		by rubbing icebergs together. If one wants a
+		good simple working outfit for a prophet in
+		science and mechanics, all one has to do is to
+		think of things that are unexpected enough, and
+		they will come to pass. A scientist out in the
+		Northwest has just finished his plans for getting
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page131" name="page131"></a>131</span>hold of the other end of the force of gravity.
+		The general idea is to build a sort of tower or
+		flag-pole on the planet&#8212;something that reaches
+		far enough out over the edge to get an underhold
+		as it were&#8212;grip hold of the force of gravity
+		where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone
+		can see at a glance, when it is once built
+		out with steel, the first forty miles or so (workmen
+		using compressed air and tubular trolleys,
+		etc.), everything on the tower would pull the
+		other way and the pressure would gradually be
+		relieved until the thing balanced itself. When
+		completed it could be used to draw down electricity
+		from waste space (which has as much as
+		everybody on this planet could ever want, and
+		more). What a little earth like ours would
+		develop into, with a connection like this&#8212;a
+		sort of umbilical cord to the infinite&#8212;no one
+		would care to try to say. It would at least be
+		a kind of planet that would always be sure of
+		anything it wanted. When we had used up all
+		the raw material or live force in our own world
+		we could draw on the others. At the very
+		least we would have a sort of signal station to
+		the planets in general that would be useful.
+		They would know what we want, and if we
+		could not get it from them they would tell us
+		where we could.</p>
+
+		<p>All this may be a little mixing perhaps.
+		It is always difficult to tell the difference between
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page132" name="page132"></a>132</span>the sublime and the ridiculous in talking
+		of a being like man. It is what makes him
+		sublime&#8212;that there is no telling about him&#8212;that
+		he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going
+		son of God and throws off a world every now
+		and then, or puts one on, with quips and jests.
+		When the laugh dies away his jokes are prophecies.
+		It behooves us therefore to walk softly,
+		you and I, Gentle Reader, while we are here
+		with him&#8212;while this dear gentle ground is still
+		beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach.
+		Let us notice stars more.</p>
+
+		<p>In the meantime it does seem to me that a
+		comparatively simple affair like this one single
+		planet, need not worry us much.</p>
+
+		<p>I still keep seeing it&#8212;I cannot help it&#8212;I
+		always keep seeing it&#8212;eternities at a time,
+		warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same
+		old green and white, with all its improvements
+		on it, whatever the sun does. And above all I
+		keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and
+		of love and worship, being born and buried&#8212;the
+		little-great man, running about and strutting,
+		flying through space on it, all his interests and
+		his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning
+		to worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man
+		does with the other worlds or with this one,
+		I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand
+		or deck in eternity, for praying and singing and
+		living, it always was. Long after I am dead,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page133" name="page133"></a>133</span>oh, dear little planet, least and furthest breath
+		that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to
+		you, rises around you, and looks back upon
+		you and watches you down there in your
+		round white cloud, rowing faithfully through
+		space!</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_4" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page134" name="page134"></a>134</span>IV</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY</h3>
+		<p>If I had never thought of it before, and some
+		one were to come around to my study tomorrow
+		morning and tell me that I was immortal,
+		I am not at all sure that I would be attracted
+		by it. The first thing that I should do, probably,
+		would be to argue a little&#8212;ask him what
+		it was for. I might take some pains not to
+		commit myself (one does not want to settle a
+		million years in a few minutes), but I cannot
+		help being conscious, on the inside of my own
+		mind, at least, that the first thought on immortality
+		that would come to me, would be that
+		perhaps it might be overdoing things a little.</p>
+
+		<p>I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware
+		that a great many men and women are
+		talking to-day about immortality and writing
+		about it. I know many people too, who, in a
+		faithful, worried way seem to be lugging about
+		with them, while they live, what they call a
+		faith in immortality. I would not mean to say
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page135" name="page135"></a>135</span>a word against immortality, if I were asked suddenly
+		and had never thought of it before. If by
+		putting out my hand I could get some of it, for
+		other people,&#8212;people that wanted it or thought
+		they did&#8212;I would probably. They would be
+		happier and easier to live with. I could watch
+		them enjoying the idea of how long they were
+		going to last. There would be a certain social
+		pleasure in it. But, speaking strictly for myself,
+		if I were asked suddenly and had never
+		heard of it before, I would not have the slightest
+		preference on the subject. It may be true, as
+		some say, that a man is only half alive if he
+		does not long to live forever, but while I have
+		the best wishes and intentions with regard to
+		my hope for immortality I cannot get interested.
+		I feel as if I were living forever now,
+		this very moment, right here on the premises&#8212;Universe,
+		Earth, United States of America,
+		Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts.
+		I feel infinitely related every day and
+		hour and minute of my life, to an infinite number
+		of things. As for joggling God&#8217;s elbow or
+		praying to Him or any such thing as that, under
+		the circumstances, and begging Him to let me
+		live forever, it always seems to me (I have done
+		it sometimes when I was very tired) as if it
+		were a way of denying Him to His face. How
+		a man who is literally standing up to his soul&#8217;s
+		eyes, and to the tops of the stars in the infinite,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page136" name="page136"></a>136</span>who can feel the eternal throbbing through the
+		very pores of his body, can so far lose his sense
+		of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as
+		to put up a petition to God to live forever, I
+		entirely fail to see. I always feel as if I had
+		stopped living forever&#8212;to ask Him.</p>
+
+		<p>I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car
+		when all the world was asleep, and have been
+		shot through still country fields in the great
+		blackness. All things that were&#8212;it seemed to
+		my soul, were snuffed out. It was as if all the
+		earth had become a whir and a bit of light&#8212;had
+		dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar
+		through Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself
+		I said, &#8220;Now I will try to realize Motion. I
+		will see if I can know. I spread my soul about
+		me&#8230;.&#8221; Ties flying under my feet, black
+		poles picked out with lights, flapping ghostlike
+		past the windows&#8230;. Voices of wheels over
+		and under&#8230;. The long, dreary waver of
+		the something that sounds when the car stops
+		(and which feels like taking gas) &#8230; the
+		semi-confidential, semi-public talk of the passengers,
+		the sudden collision with silence, they
+		come to, when the car halts&#8212;all these. Finally
+		when I look up every one has slipped away.
+		Then I find my soul spreading further and further.
+		The great night, silent and splendid,
+		builds itself over me. The night is the crowded
+		time to travel&#8212;car almost to one&#8217;s self, nothing
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page137" name="page137"></a>137</span>but a few whirls of light and a conductor for
+		company&#8212;the long monotone of miles&#8212;miles&#8212;flying
+		beside me and above and around and beneath&#8212;all
+		this shadowed world to belong to, to
+		dwell in, to pick out with one&#8217;s soul from Darkness.
+		&#8220;Here am I,&#8221; I said as the roar tightened
+		once more, and gripped on its awful wire and
+		glowed through the blackness. &#8220;Here I am in
+		infinite space, I and my bit of glimmer&#8230;.
+		Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on,
+		and stamp my feet on to know it is there, falls
+		and plunges with me out through deserts of
+		space, and stars I cannot see have their hand
+		upon me and hold me.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>No one would deny that the idea of immortality
+		is a well-meaning idea and pleasantly inclined
+		and intended to be appreciative of a God,
+		but it does seem to me that it is one of the most
+		absent-minded ways of appreciating Him that
+		could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High
+		Street. I have all the immortality I can use,
+		without going through my own front gate. I
+		have but to look out of a window. There is no
+		denying that Mount Tom is convenient, and as
+		a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or horse-block to
+		the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal,
+		a mountain may be an advantage, perhaps,
+		and make some difference; but I must confess
+		that it seems to me that in all times and in all
+		places a man&#8217;s immortality is absolutely in his
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page138" name="page138"></a>138</span>own hands. His immortality consists in his
+		being in an immortally related state of mind.
+		His immortality is his sense of having infinite
+		relations with all the time there is, and his infinity
+		consists in his having infinite relations
+		with all the space there is. Wherever, as a
+		matter of form, a man may say he is living or
+		staying, the universe is his real address.</p>
+
+		<p>I have been at sea&#8212;lain with a board over
+		me out in the wide night and looked at the infinite
+		through a port-hole. Over the edge of the
+		swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and
+		possessed them. Under my board in the night
+		I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered
+		it in my heart, shared it until I could not
+		sleep with the joy of it&#8212;the great ship with all
+		its souls throbbing a planet through me and
+		chanting it to me. I thought to my soul,
+		&#8220;Where art thou?&#8221; I looked down upon myself
+		as if I were a God looking down on myself
+		and upon the others, and upon the ship and
+		upon the waters.</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>A thousand breaths we lie</p>
+				<p>Shrouded limbs and faces</p>
+				<p>Horizontal</p>
+				<p>Packed in cases</p>
+				<p>In our named and numbered places,</p>
+				<p>Catalogued for sleep,</p>
+				<p>Trembling through the Godlight</p>
+				<p>Below, above,</p>
+				<p>Deep to Deep.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page139" name="page139"></a>139</span>How a church-going man in a world like this
+		can possibly contrive to have time to cry out or
+		worry on it, or to be troubled about another&#8212;how
+		he can demand another, the way he does
+		sometimes, as if it were the only thing left a
+		God could do to straighten matters out for having
+		put him on this one, and how he can call
+		this religion&#8212;is a problem that leaves my mind
+		like an exhausted receiver. It is a grave question
+		whether any immortality they are likely to
+		get in another world would ever really pay some
+		people for the time they have wasted in this
+		one, worrying about it.</p>
+
+		<p>Does any science in the world suppose or dare
+		to suppose that I am as unimportant in it as I
+		look&#8212;or that I could be if I tried? that I am a
+		parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under
+		a shimmering mist of worlds that do not serve
+		me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am
+		not living and that I will not and cannot live
+		underneath a universe &#8230; with a little horizon
+		or teacup of space set down over me. The
+		whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs
+		to me and I to it. I have said to the
+		heavens that they shall hourly minister to me&#8212;to
+		the uses of my spirit and the needs of my
+		body. When I, or my spirit, would move a
+		little I swing out on stars. In the watches of
+		the night they reach under my eyelids and serve
+		my sleep and wait on me with dreams, I know
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page140" name="page140"></a>140</span>I am immortal because I know I am infinite.
+		A man is at least as long as he is wide. There
+		is no need to quibble with words. I care little
+		enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever
+		across my soul or everywhere across it.
+		Whichever it is, I make it the other when I am
+		ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely
+		related life, why should it matter whether
+		he is eternal as he calls it or not,&#8212;takes his
+		immortality sideways here, now, and in the
+		terms of space or later with some kind of time-arrangement
+		stretched out and petering along
+		over a long, narrow row of years?</p>
+
+		<p>Thousands of things are happening that are
+		mine&#8212;out, around, and through the great darkness&#8212;being
+		born and killed and ticked and
+		printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself
+		with sleep, do I not know that the lightning
+		is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam
+		I say, &#8220;There is my omnipresence.&#8221; My being
+		is busy out in the universe having its way somewhere.
+		The days on the other side of the world
+		are my days. I get what I want out of them
+		without having to keep awake for them. In
+		the middle of the night and without trying I lay
+		my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever
+		it may be, or whether I so much as look upon
+		it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof for
+		me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.</p>
+
+		<h4 class="section_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page141" name="page141"></a>141</span>II</h4>
+
+		<p>I have been reading lately a book on Immortality,
+		the leading idea of which seems to be a
+		sort of astral body for people&#8212;people who are
+		worthy of it. The author does not believe after
+		the old-fashioned method that we are going to
+		the stars. He intimates (for all practical purposes)
+		that we do not need to. The stars are
+		coming to us,&#8212;are already being woven in us.
+		The author does not say it in so many words,
+		but the general idea seems to be that the more
+		spiritual or subtle body we are going to have,
+		is already started in us&#8212;if we live as we should&#8212;growing
+		like a kind of lining for this one.</p>
+
+		<p>I can only speak for one, but I find that when
+		I am willing to take the time from reading books
+		on immortality to enjoy a few infinite experiences,
+		I am not apt to be troubled very much
+		about another world.</p>
+
+		<p>It is daily obvious to me that I belong and
+		that I am living in an infinite and eternal world,
+		inconceivably better planned and managed than
+		one of mine would be, and the only logical thing
+		that I can do, is to take it for granted that the
+		next one is even better than this. If the main
+		feature of the next world consists in there not
+		being one, then so much the better. I would
+		not have thought so. It seems a little abrupt
+		at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page142" name="page142"></a>142</span>and why not leave it to God to work it out?
+		He doesn&#8217;t have to neglect anything to do it&#8212;which
+		is what we do&#8212;and He is going to do it
+		anyway.</p>
+
+		<p>I have refused to take time from my infinity
+		now for a theory of a theory about some new
+		kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly
+		still. There is an infinite opening and shutting
+		of doors for me, through all the heavens and the
+		earth. I lie with my head in the deep grass. A
+		square yard is forever across. I listen to a
+		great city in the grass&#8212;millions of insects.
+		Microscopes have threaded it for me. I know
+		their city&#8212;all its mighty little highways. I
+		possess it. And when I walk away I rebuild
+		their city softly in my heart. Winds, tides, and
+		vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may
+		possess them. I reach down to the silent metals
+		under my feet that millions of ages have worked
+		on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel
+		the sun and the lives of nations flowing around
+		to me, from under the sea. Who can shut me
+		out from anybody&#8217;s sunrise?</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>&#8220;Oh, tenderly the haughty day</p>
+				<p>Fills his blue urn with fire;</p>
+				<p>One morn is in the mighty heaven</p>
+				<p>And one in my desire.&#8221;</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p>I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers
+		on earth. I can telegraph for them. I go to
+		<span class = "pagenum"><a id="page143" name="page143"></a>143</span>the weather I want. The sky&#8212;to me&#8212;is no
+		longer a great, serious, foreign-looking shore,
+		conducting a big foolish cloud-business, sending
+		down decrees of weather on helpless cities.
+		With a whistle and a roar I defy it&#8212;move any
+		strip of it out from over me&#8212;for any other
+		strip. I order the time of year. It is my sky.
+		I bend it a little&#8212;just a little. The sky no
+		longer has a monopoly of wonder. With the
+		hands of my hands, my brother and I have
+		made an earth that can answer a sky back, that
+		can commune with a sky. The soul at last
+		guesses at its real self. It reaches out and
+		dares. Men go about singing with telescopes.
+		I do not always need to lift my hands to a sky
+		and pray to it now. I am related to it. With
+		the hands of my hands I work with it. I say
+		&#8220;I and the sky.&#8221; I say &#8220;I and the Earth.&#8221;
+		We are immortal because we are infinite. We
+		have reached over with the hands of our hands.
+		They are praying a stupendous prayer&#8212;a kind
+		of god&#8217;s prayer. God&#8217;s hand has been grasped&#8212;vaguely&#8212;wonderfully
+		out in the Dark. No
+		longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one
+		of his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime
+		itself is a neighborly thought. God&#8217;s
+		machine&#8212;up&#8212;There&#8212;and the machines of the
+		man have signaled each other.</p>
+
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_5" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page144" name="page144"></a>144</span>V</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF GOD</h3>
+		<p>My study (not the place where I get my
+		knowledge but the place where I put it
+		together) is a great meadow&#8212;ten square splendid
+		level miles of it&#8212;as fenceless and as open as a sky&#8212;merely
+		two mountains to stand guard. If
+		<span class="keep_together">H&#8212;&#8212;</span> the scientist who lives nearest to me
+		(that is; nearest to my mind,) were to come
+		down to me to-morrow morning, down in my
+		meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and
+		railways humming gently around the edges
+		and tell me that he had found a God, I would
+		not believe it. &#8220;Where?&#8221; I would say, &#8220;in
+		which Bottle?&#8221; I have groped for one all these
+		years. Ever since I was a child I have been
+		groping for a God. I thought one had to. I have
+		turned over the pages of ancient books and
+		hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the
+		events of the great world and looked on the
+		under sides of leaves and guessed on the other
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page145" name="page145"></a>145</span>sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could
+		make out to find a God in that way. I wonder
+		if anyone can.</p>
+
+		<p>I know it is not the right spirit to have, but
+		I must confess that when the scientist (the
+		smaller sort of scientist around the corner in my
+		mind and everybody&#8217;s mind) with all his retorts
+		and things, pottering with his argument of design,
+		comes down to me in my meadow and reminds
+		me that he has been looking for a God and tells
+		me cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious
+		hems and haws that he has found Him, I
+		wonder if he has.</p>
+
+		<p>The very necessity a man is under of seeking
+		a God at all, in a world alive all over like this,
+		of feeling obliged to go on a long journey to
+		search one out makes one doubt if the kind of
+		God he would find would be worth while. I
+		have never caught a man yet who has found
+		his God in this way, enjoying Him or getting
+		anyone else to.</p>
+
+		<p>It does seem to me that the idea of a God is
+		an absolutely plain, rudimentary, fundamental,
+		universal human instinct, that the very essence
+		of finding a God consists in His not having to
+		be looked for, in giving one&#8217;s self up to one&#8217;s plain
+		every-day infinite experiences. I suppose if
+		it could be analyzed, the poet&#8217;s real quarrel
+		with the scientist is not that he is material, but
+		that he is not material enough,&#8212;he does not
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page146" name="page146"></a>146</span>conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot
+		believe for instance that any man on earth to
+		whom the great spectacle of matter going on
+		every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed
+		thing&#8212;any man who is willing to turn aside
+		from this spectacle&#8212;this spectacle as a whole&#8212;and
+		who looks for a God like a chemist in a
+		bottle for instance&#8212;a bottle which he places
+		absolutely by itself, would be able to find one if
+		he tried. It seems to me that it is by letting
+		one&#8217;s self have one&#8217;s infinite&#8212;one&#8217;s infinitely
+		related experiences, and not by cutting them off
+		that one comes to know a God. To find a God
+		who is everywhere one must at least spend a
+		part of one&#8217;s time in being everywhere one&#8217;s self&#8212;in
+		relating one&#8217;s knowledge to all knowledge.</p>
+
+		<p>There are various undergirding arguments
+		and reasons, but the only way that I really
+		know there is an infinite God is because I am
+		infinite&#8212;in a small way&#8212;myself. Even the
+		matter that has come into the world connected
+		with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite.
+		If my soul, like some dim pale light left burning
+		within me, were merely to creep to the boundaries
+		of its own body, it would know there was a
+		God. The very flesh I live with every day is
+		infinite flesh. From the furthest rumors of
+		men and women, the furthest edge of time and
+		space my soul has gathered dust to itself.
+		I carry a temple about with me. If I could
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page147" name="page147"></a>147</span>do no better, and if there were need, I am my
+		own cathedral. I worship when I breathe.
+		I bow down before the tick of my pulse. I chant
+		to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of
+		my fingers could not be duplicated in a million
+		years. Shall any man ask me to prove there
+		are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go
+		out into some great breath of emptiness or argument
+		to be sure there is a God? I am infinite.
+		Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the God
+		within me. Has He not kindled the fire in
+		my bones and out of the burning dust warmed
+		me before the stars&#8212;made a hearth for my
+		soul before them? I am at home with them.
+		I sit daily before worlds as at my own fireside.</p>
+
+		<p>I suppose there is something intolerant and
+		impatient and a little heartless about an optimist&#8212;especially
+		the kind of optimism that is based
+		upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the
+		structure of the world. There is such a thing,
+		I suppose, with some of us, as having a kind of
+		devilish pride in faith, as one would say to
+		ordinary mortals and creepers and considerers
+		and arguers &#8220;Oh now just see me believe!&#8221;
+		We are like boys taking turns jumping in the
+		Great Vacant Lot, seeing which can believe the
+		furthest. We need to be reminded that a man
+		cannot simply bring a little brag to God, about
+		His world, and make a religion out of it. I do
+		not doubt in the least, as a matter of theory,
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page148" name="page148"></a>148</span>that I have the wrong spirit&#8212;sometimes&#8212;toward
+		the scientific man who lives around the
+		corner of my mind. It seems to me he is always
+		suggesting important-looking unimportant
+		things. I have days of sympathizing with him,
+		of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack up
+		upon my shoulders and strapping it there.
+		But before I know it I&#8217;m off. I throw it away
+		or melt it down into a tablet or something&#8212;put
+		it in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God.</p>
+
+		<p>And the worst of it is, I think He intended
+		me to. I think He intended me to know and to
+		keep knowing daily what He has done for me
+		and is doing now, out in the universe, and
+		what He has made me to do. I also am a God.
+		From the first time I saw the sun I have been
+		one daily. I have performed daily all the
+		homelier miracles and all the common functions
+		of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into
+		my being. Out of the air of heaven I have
+		made flesh. I have taken earth from the earth
+		and burned it within me and made it into prayers
+		and into songs. I have said to my soul &#8220;To
+		eat is to sing.&#8221; I worship all over. I am my
+		own sacrament. I lay before God nights of
+		sleep, and the delight and wonder of the flesh I
+		render back to Him again, daily, as an offering
+		in His sight.</p>
+
+		<p>And what is true of my literal body&#8212;of the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page149" name="page149"></a>149</span>joy of my hands and my feet, is still more true
+		of the hands of my hands.</p>
+
+		<p>When I wake in the night and send forth my
+		thought upon the darkness, track out my own
+		infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky
+		reaching around me, all telegraphed through with
+		thought, and floored with steel, I may have
+		to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes),
+		but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the
+		door of heaven if there is a heaven or needs
+		to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory
+		of the other worlds, has not science itself told
+		me that they are a part of me and I a part of
+		them? Nothing is that would not be different
+		without something else. My thoughts are
+		ticking through the clouds, and the great sun
+		itself is creeping through me daily down in my
+		bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a
+		hundred seas. I turn over in my sleep at midnight
+		and lay my hand on the noon. And
+		when I have slept and walk forth in the morning,
+		the stars flow in my veins. Why should a man
+		dare to whine? &#8220;Whine not at me!&#8221; I have
+		said to man my brother. If you cannot sing
+		to me do not interrupt me.</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Let him sing to me</p>
+				<p>Who sees the watching of the stars above the day,</p>
+				<p>Who hears the singing of the sunrise</p>
+				<p>On its way</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page150" name="page150"></a>150</span>Through all the night.</p>
+				<p>Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms,</p>
+				<p>Whose soul has roamed</p>
+				<p>Infinite-homed</p>
+				<p>Through tents of Space,</p>
+				<p>His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms</p>
+				<p>All wonder.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Let him sing to me</p>
+				<p>Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover</p>
+				<p>Who hears above the wind&#8217;s fast-flying shrouds</p>
+				<p>The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife,</p>
+				<p>The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds,</p>
+				<p>Of His Own Life.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_6" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page151" name="page151"></a>151</span>VI</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE</h3>
+		<h4 class="ode_title">AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN</h4>
+		<div class="poem">
+		<div class="stanza">
+		<p>Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,</p>
+		<p>Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words</p>
+		<p>In the music-haunted houses of the birds,</p>
+		<p>Singers with the thrushes and pewees</p>
+		<p>In the glimmer-lighted roofs</p>
+		<p>Of the trees&#8212;</p>
+		<p>Unhand my soul!</p>
+		<p>Buds with singing in their hearts,</p>
+		<p>Birds with blooms upon their wings,</p>
+		<p>All the wandering whispers of delight,</p>
+		<p>The near familiar things;</p>
+		<p>Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,</p>
+		<p>Sounds of going in the grain</p>
+		<p>Shall not bind me to thy singing</p>
+		<p>When the sky with God is ringing</p>
+		<p>For the Joy of the Rain.</p>
+		<p>Sea and star and hill and thunder,</p>
+		<p>Dawn and sunset, noon and night,</p>
+		<p>All the vast processional of the wonder</p>
+		<p>Where the worlds are,</p>
+		<p>Where my soul is,</p>
+		<p>Where the shining tracks are</p>
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page152" name="page152"></a>152</span>For the spirit&#8217;s flight&#8212;</p>
+		<p>Lift thine eyes to these</p>
+		<p>From the haunts of dewdrops,</p>
+		<p>Hollows of the flowers,</p>
+		<p>Caves of bees</p>
+		<p>That sing like thee,</p>
+		<p>Only in their bowers;</p>
+		<p>From the stately growing cities</p>
+		<p>Of the little blowing leaves,</p>
+		<p>To the infinite windless eaves</p>
+		<p>Of the stars;</p>
+		<p>From the dainty music of the ground,</p>
+		<p>The dim innumerable sound</p>
+		<p>Of the Mighty Sun</p>
+		<p>Creeping in the grass,</p>
+		<p>Softest stir of His feet</p>
+		<p>(Where they go</p>
+		<p>Far and slow</p>
+		<p>On their immemorial beat</p>
+		<p>Of buds and seeds</p>
+		<p>And all the gentle and holy needs</p>
+		<p>Of flowers),</p>
+		<p>To the old eternal round</p>
+		<p>Of the Going of His Might,</p>
+		<p>Above the confines of the dark,</p>
+		<p>Odors and winds and showers,</p>
+		<p>Day and night,</p>
+		<p>Above the dream of death and birth</p>
+		<p>Flickering East and West,</p>
+		<p>Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth&#8212;</p>
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page153" name="page153"></a>153</span>Where He wheels</p>
+		<p>And soars</p>
+		<p>And plays</p>
+		<p>In illimitable light,</p>
+		<p>Sends the singing stars upon their ways</p>
+		<p>And on each and every world</p>
+		<p>When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep</p>
+		<p>Is furled&#8212;</p>
+		<p>Pours the Days.</p>
+		</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p class="ode_thought_break">&bull;&bull;&bull;</p>
+
+		<p>The first time I gazed in the great town upon
+		a solid mile of electric cars&#8212;threaded with
+		Nothing&#8212;mesmerism hauling a whole city
+		home to supper, it seemed to me as if the
+		central power of all things, The Thing that
+		floats and breathes through the universe, must
+		have been found by someone&#8212;gathered up
+		from between stars, and turned on&#8212;poured
+		down gently on the planet&#8212;falling on a thousand
+		wheels, and run on the tops of cars&#8212;the secret
+		thrill that softly and out in the darkness and
+		through all ages had done all things. I felt
+		as if I had seen the infinite in some near familiar,
+		humdrum place. I walked on in a dazed
+		fashion. I do not suppose I could really have
+		been more surprised if I had met a star walking
+		in the street.</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>In my deepest dream</p>
+				<p>I heard the Song</p>
+				<p>Running in my sleep</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page154" name="page154"></a>154</span>Through the lowest caves of Being</p>
+				<p>Down below</p>
+				<p>Where no sound is, sun is,</p>
+				<p>Hearing, seeing</p>
+				<p>That men know.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p>There was something about it, about that
+		sense of the mile of cars moving, that made
+		it all seem very old.</p>
+
+		<h4 class="ode_title">An Ode to the Lightning.</h4>
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Before the first new dust of dream God took</p>
+				<p>For making man and hope and love and graves</p>
+				<p>Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods</p>
+				<p>Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow</p>
+				<p>Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,</p>
+				<p>The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague</p>
+				<p>To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept</p>
+				<p>From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff</p>
+				<p>That wove the worlds,</p>
+				<p>Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,</p>
+				<p>While still, hinged on nothing,</p>
+				<p>Dim and shapeless Things</p>
+				<p>And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings</p>
+				<p>Floated and waited.</p>
+				<p>Before the winds had breathed the breath of life</p>
+				<p>Or blown from wastes of Space</p>
+				<p>To Earth&#8217;s creating place,</p>
+				<p>The souls of seeds</p>
+				<p>And ghosts of old dead stars,</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page155" name="page155"></a>155</span>The Lightning Spirit willed</p>
+				<p>Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.</p>
+				<p>&#8212;Primal fire of all desire</p>
+				<p>That leaps from men to men,</p>
+				<p>Brother of Suns</p>
+				<p>And all the Glorious Ones</p>
+				<p>That circle skies,</p>
+				<p>He flashed to these</p>
+				<p>The night that brought the birth,</p>
+				<p>The vision of the place</p>
+				<p>And raised his awful face</p>
+				<p>To all their glittering crowds,</p>
+				<p>And cried from where It lay</p>
+				<p>&#8212;A tiny ball of fire and clay</p>
+				<p>In swaddling clothes of clouds,</p>
+				<p>&#8220;Behold the Earth!&#8221;</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<p class="ode_thought_break">&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;</p>
+			<p class="ode_thought_break">&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;&bull;</p>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer</p>
+				<p>Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!</p>
+				<p>Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.</p>
+				<p>Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven</p>
+				<p>And heaven and Heaven&#8217;s heaven.  Oh thou whose play</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page156" name="page156"></a>156</span>Men make to do their work (<em>Why do their work?</em>)</p>
+				<p>&#8212;And call from holidays of space, sojourns</p>
+				<p>Of suns and moons, and lock to earth</p>
+				<p>(<em>Why lock to earth?</em>)</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+			    <p class="ode_thought_break_2">That the Dead Face may flash across the seas</p>
+			    <p>The cry of the new-born babe be heard around</p>
+			    <p>A world. Ah me! and the click of lust</p>
+			    <p>And the madness and the gladness and the ache</p>
+			    <p>Of Dust, Dust!</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<h4 class="section_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page157" name="page157"></a>157</span>AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.</h4>
+		<p class="ode_subtitle">THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE</p>
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>The mortal wires of the heart of the earth</p>
+				<p>I sing, melted and fused by men,</p>
+				<p>That the immortal fires of their souls should fling</p>
+				<p>To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,</p>
+				<p>And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense</p>
+				<p>The flame of the Creature&#8217;s ken,</p>
+				<p>The flame of the glow of the face of God</p>
+				<p>Upon the face of men.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Wind-singing wires</p>
+				<p>Along their thousand airy aisles,</p>
+				<p>Feet of birds and songs of leaves,</p>
+				<p>Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.</p>
+				<p>Sea-singing wires</p>
+				<p>Along their thousand slimy miles,</p>
+				<p>Shadowy deeps,</p>
+				<p>Unsunned steeps,</p>
+				<p>Beating in their awful caves</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page158" name="page158"></a>158</span>To mouthing fish and bones</p>
+				<p>And weeds unfurled</p>
+				<p>Deserts of waves</p>
+				<p>The heart-beat of this upper world.</p>
+				<p>Infinite blue, infinite green,</p>
+				<p>Infinite glory of the ear</p>
+				<p>Ticking its passions through</p>
+				<p>Infinite fear,</p>
+				<p>Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks</p>
+				<p>The forever untrodden decks</p>
+				<p>Of Death,</p>
+				<p>Ever the seething wires</p>
+				<p>On the floors</p>
+				<p>Of the world,</p>
+				<p>Below the last</p>
+				<p>Locked fast</p>
+				<p>Water-darkened doors</p>
+				<p>Of the sun,</p>
+				<p>Lighting the awful signal fires</p>
+				<p>Of our speechless vast desires</p>
+				<p>On the mountains and the hills</p>
+				<p>Of the sea</p>
+				<p>Till the sandy-buried heights</p>
+				<p>And the sullen sunken vales</p>
+				<p>And fire-defying barrens of the deep</p>
+				<p>The hearth of souls shall be</p>
+				<p>Beacons of Thought,</p>
+				<p>And from the lurk of the shark</p>
+				<p>To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark</p>
+				<p>And where the farthest cloud-sail fills</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page159" name="page159"></a>159</span>Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping</p>
+				<p>The might and mad delight,</p>
+				<p>The hell-and-heaven groping</p>
+				<p>Of our little human wills.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<h4 class="section_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page160" name="page160"></a>160</span>AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS</h4>
+		<p class="ode_subtitle">THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH WOULD NOT WORK</p>
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Roofed in with fears,</p>
+				<p>Beneath its little strip of sky</p>
+				<p>That is blown about</p>
+				<p>In and out</p>
+				<p>Across my wavering strip of years&#8212;</p>
+				<p>Who am I</p>
+				<p>Whose singing scarce doth reach</p>
+				<p>The cloud-climbed hills,</p>
+				<p>To take upon my lips the speech</p>
+				<p>Of those whose voices Heaven fills</p>
+				<p>With splendor?</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>And yet&#8212;</p>
+				<p>I cannot quite forget</p>
+				<p>That in the underdawn of dreams</p>
+				<p>I have felt the faint surmise</p>
+				<p>Shining through the starry deep of my sleep</p>
+				<p>That I with God went singing once</p>
+				<p>Up and down with suns and storms</p>
+				<p>Through the phantom-pillared forms</p>
+				<p>And stately-silent naves</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page161" name="page161"></a>161</span>And thunder-dreaming caves</p>
+				<p>Of Heaven.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Great Spirit&#8212;Thou who in my being&#8217;s burning mesh</p>
+				<p>Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,</p>
+				<p>Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust</p>
+				<p>Hast thrust</p>
+				<p>Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,</p>
+				<p>Where are the deeds that needs must be,</p>
+				<p>The dreams, the high delights,</p>
+				<p>That I once more may hear my voice</p>
+				<p>From cloudy door to door rejoice&#8212;</p>
+				<p>May stretch the boundaries of love</p>
+				<p>Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears</p>
+				<p>To the faint-remembered glory of those years&#8212;</p>
+				<p>May lift my soul</p>
+				<p>And reach this Heaven of thine</p>
+				<p>With mine?</p>
+				<p>Where are the gleams?</p>
+				<p>Thou shalt tell me,</p>
+				<p>Shalt compel me.</p>
+				<p>The sometime glory shall return</p>
+				<p>I know.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>The day shall be</p>
+				<p>When by wondering I shall learn</p>
+				<p>With vapor-fingers to discern</p>
+				<p>The music-hidden keys of skies&#8212;</p>
+				<p>Shall touch like thee</p>
+				<p>Until they answer me</p>
+				<p>The chords of the silent air</p>
+				<p>And strike the wild and slumber-music out</p>
+				<p>Dreaming there.</p>
+				<p>Above the hills of singing that I know</p>
+				<p>On the trackless, soundless path</p>
+				<p>That wonder hath</p>
+				<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page162" name="page162"></a>162</span>I shall go,</p>
+				<p>Beyond the street-cry of the poet,</p>
+				<p>The hurdy-gurdy singing</p>
+				<p>Of the throngs,</p>
+				<p>To the Throne of Silence,</p>
+				<p>Where the Doors</p>
+				<p>That guard the farthest faintest shores</p>
+				<p>Of Day</p>
+				<p>Swing their bars,</p>
+				<p>And shut the songs of heaven in</p>
+				<p>From all our dreaming-doing din,</p>
+				<p>Behind the stars.</p>
+			</div>
+
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>There, at last,</p>
+				<p>The climbing and the singing passed,</p>
+				<p>And the cry,</p>
+				<p>My hushed and listening soul shall lie</p>
+				<p>At the feet of the place</p>
+				<p>Where the Singer sings</p>
+				<p>Who Hides His Face.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_7" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page163" name="page163"></a>163</span>VII</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN</h3>
+		<div class="epigram">
+			<div class="poem">
+				<div class="stanza">
+					<p>&#8220;I had a vision under a green hedge</p>
+					<p>A hedge of hips and haws&#8212;Men yet shall hear</p>
+					<p>Archangels rolling over the high mountains</p>
+					<p>Old Satan&#8217;s empty skull.&#8221;</p>
+				</div>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<p>As it looks from <span class="emphasized">Mount Tom</span>, casting a general
+		glance around, the Earth has about been put
+		into shape, now, to do things.</p>
+
+		<p>The Earth has never been seen before looking
+		so trim and convenient&#8212;so ready for action&#8212;as
+		it is now. Steamships and looms and printing
+		presses and railways have been supplied, wireless
+		telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged
+		throughout, and we have put in speaking tubes
+		on nearly all the continents, and it looks&#8212;as
+		seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet
+		were just being finished up, now, for a Great
+		Author.</p>
+
+		<p>It is true that art and literature do not have,
+		at first glance, a prosperous look in a machine
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page164" name="page164"></a>164</span>age, but probably the real trouble the modern
+		world is having with its authors is not because
+		it is a world full of materialism and machinery,
+		but because its authors are the wrong size.</p>
+
+		<p>The modern world as it booms along recognizes
+		this, in its practical way, and instead of
+		stopping to speak to its little authors, to its
+		poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and
+		encouraging them, it is quietly and sensibly
+		(as it seems to some of us) going on with its
+		machines and things making preparations for
+		bigger ones.</p>
+
+		<p>I have thought the great authors in every
+		age were made by the greatness of the listening
+		to them. The greatest of all, I notice, have felt
+		listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who
+		have sometimes been called greatest) have felt
+		listened to, most of them, one finds, by nothing
+		less than nations. The man Jesus gathers
+		kingdoms about Him in His talk, like an infant
+		class. It was the way He felt. Almost any one
+		who could have felt himself listened to in this
+		daring way that Jesus did would have managed
+		to say something. He could hardly have missed,
+		one would think, letting fall one or two great
+		ideas at least&#8212;ideas that nations would be
+		born for.</p>
+
+		<p>It ought not to be altogether without meaning
+		to a modern man that the great prophets and
+		interpreters have talked as a rule to whole
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page165" name="page165"></a>165</span>nations and that they have talked to them
+		generally, too, for the glory of the whole earth.
+		They could not get their souls geared smaller
+		than a whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations
+		stretching away like galleries around
+		him listening&#8212;when he makes love. It was no
+		particular heroism or patience in the man
+		Columbus that made him sail across an ocean
+		and discover a continent. He had the girth
+		of an earth in him and had to do something
+		with it. He could not have helped it. He
+		discovered America because he felt crowded.</p>
+
+		<p>One would think from the way some people
+		have of talking or writing of immortality
+		that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter
+		of historic fact it has almost always been some
+		mere great man&#8217;s helplessness. When people
+		have to be created and born on purpose, generation
+		after generation of them, to listen to a
+		man, two or three thousand years of them sometimes,
+		on this planet, it is because the man
+		himself when he spoke felt the need of them&#8212;and
+		mentioned it. It is the man who is in
+		the habit of addressing his remarks to a few
+		continents and to several centuries who gets
+		them.</p>
+
+		<p>I would not dare to say just how or when our
+		next great author on this earth is going to happen
+		to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and look
+		expectant the first time I hear of a man who
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page166" name="page166"></a>166</span>gets up on his feet somewhere in it and who
+		speaks as if the whole earth were listening to
+		him. If ever there was an earth that is getting
+		ready to listen, and to listen all over, it is this
+		one. And the first great man who speaks in it
+		is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world
+		which has been allowed about a million years
+		now, to get to the point where it could be said
+		to begin to be conscious of being a world at all.
+		And I cannot believe that a world which for
+		the first time in its history has at last the conveniences
+		for listening all over, if it wants to,
+		is not going to produce at the same time a man
+		who shall have something to say to it&#8212;a man
+		that shall be worthy of the first single full
+		audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been
+		thought of. It would seem as if, to say the
+		least, such an audience as this, gathering half
+		in light and half in darkness around a star,
+		would celebrate by having a man to match.
+		It would not be necessary for him to fall back,
+		either, one would think, upon anything that
+		has ever been said or thought of before. Already
+		even in the sight and sounds of this present
+		world has the verse of scripture about the next
+		come true&#8212;&#8220;Eye hath not seen nor ear heard.&#8221;
+		It is not conceivable that there shall not be
+		something said unspeakably and incredibly
+		great to the first full house the planet has
+		afforded.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page167" name="page167"></a>167</span>I have gone to the place of books. I have
+		seen before this all the peoples flocking past
+		me under the earth with their little corner-saviors&#8212;each
+		with his own little disc of worship
+		all to himself on the planet&#8212;partitioned away
+		from the rest for thousands of years. But now
+		the whole face of the earth is changed. No
+		longer can great men and great events be aimed
+		at it and glanced off on it&#8212;into single nations.
+		Great men, when they come now, can generally
+		have a world at their feet. It is not possible
+		that we shall not have them. The whole earth
+		is the wager that we are going to have them.
+		The bids are out&#8212;great statesmen, great actors,
+		great financiers, great authors&#8212;even millionaires
+		will gradually grow great. It cannot be helped.
+		And it will be strange if someone cannot
+		think of something to say, with the first full house
+		this planet has afforded.</p>
+
+		<p>Even as it is now, let any man with a great
+		girth of love in him but speak once&#8212;but speak
+		one single round-the-world delight and nations
+		sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is
+		dying with pneumonia seven seas listen to his
+		breathing. The nations are in galleries on the
+		stage of the earth now, one listening above
+		the other to the same play following around the
+		sunrise. Every one is affected by it&#8212;a kind of
+		soul-suction&#8212;a great pulling from the world.
+		People who do not want to write at all feel it&#8212;a
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page168" name="page168"></a>168</span>kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction apparently&#8212;to
+		a pen. The whole planet kindles
+		every man&#8217;s solitude. Continents are bellows
+		for the glow in him if there is any. The wireless
+		telegraph beckons ideas around the world.
+		&#8220;How does a planet applaud?&#8221; dreams the young
+		author. &#8220;With a faint flush of light?&#8221; One
+		would like to be liked by it&#8212;speak one&#8217;s little
+		piece to it. When one was through, one could
+		hear the soft hurrah through Space.</p>
+
+		<p>I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I
+		ever could have thought or had times of thinking
+		it was a little or a lonely world to write in&#8212;to
+		flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what
+		a world it was that came to men once and of
+		the world that waits around me&#8212;around all of
+		us now&#8212;I do like to mention it.</p>
+
+		<p>When many years ago, as a small boy, I was
+		allowed for the first time to open the little inside
+		door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel
+		steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the
+		sea, I did not know why it was that I could
+		not be called away from it, or why I stood and
+		watched hour after hour unconscious before
+		it&#8212;the thunder and the foam piling up upon
+		my being. I have guessed now. I watch the
+		drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were
+		tracking out at last the last secret of loneliness.
+		I face Time and Space with it. I know I
+		have but to do a true deed and I am crowded
+		round&#8212;to help me do it. I know I have but
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page169" name="page169"></a>169</span>to think a true thought, but to be true and
+		deep enough with a book&#8212;feel a worldful for
+		it, put a worldful in it&#8212;and the whole planet
+		will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands
+		of printing presses under a thousand skies
+		I hear truth working softly, saying over and
+		over, and around and around the earth, the
+		word that was given to me to say.</p>
+
+		<p>Can any one believe that this strange new,
+		deep, beautiful, clairvoyant feeling a man has
+		nowadays every day, every hour, for the other
+		side of a star, is not going to make arts and men
+		and words and actions great in the world?</p>
+
+		<p>Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching
+		the first great gathering-in of a world to
+		listen and to live. The continents are unanimous.
+		There has never been a quorum before.
+		They are getting together at last for the first
+		world-sized man, for the first world-sized word.
+		They are listening him into life. It is really
+		getting to be a planet now, a whole completed
+		articulated, furnished, lived-through, loved-through
+		star, from sun&#8217;s end to sun&#8217;s end. One
+		sees the sign on it</p>
+
+		<div class="chapter_ending">
+			<p>TO LET</p>
+			<p class="smaller_caps">TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.</p>
+		</div>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="part_4_ch_8" class="chapter">
+		<p class="chapter_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page170" name="page170"></a>170</span>VIII</p>
+		<h3 class="chapter_title">THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP</h3>
+		<div class="epigram">
+			<div class="poem">
+				<div class="stanza">
+					<p>&#8220;Ever there comes an onward phrase to me</p>
+					<p>Of some transcendent music I have heard;</p>
+					<p>No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,</p>
+					<p>No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.</p>
+					<p>But a glad strain of some still symphony</p>
+					<p>That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred.&#8221;</p>
+				</div>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<p>Have you ever walked out over the hill in your
+		city at night, Gentle Reader&#8212;your own
+		city&#8212;felt the soul of it lying about you&#8212;lying
+		there in its gentleness and splendor and lust?
+		Have you never felt as you stood there that you
+		had some right to it, some right way down in
+		your being&#8212;that all this haze of light and
+		darkness, all the people in it, somehow really
+		belonged to you? We do not exactly let our
+		souls say it&#8212;at least out loud&#8212;but there
+		are times when I have been out in the street
+		with The Others, when I have heard them&#8212;heard
+		our souls, that is&#8212;all softly trooping
+		through us, saying it to ourselves. &#8220;O to
+		know&#8212;to be utterly known one moment; to
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page171" name="page171"></a>171</span>have, if only for one second, twenty thousand
+		souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city,
+		to be sought out and haunted by some one great
+		all-love, once, streets and silent houses of it!&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>I go up and down the pavements reaching
+		out into the days and nights of the men and
+		the women. Perhaps you have seen me,
+		Gentle Reader, in The Great Street, in the long,
+		slow shuffle with the others? And I have said
+		to you though I did not know it: &#8220;Did you not
+		call to me? Did you hear anything? I think
+		it was I calling to you.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept
+		the land with my soul. I have gone about and
+		looked upon the face of the earth. I have
+		demanded of smoking villages sweeping past
+		and of the mountains and of the plains and of
+		the middle of the sea: &#8220;Where are those that
+		belong to me? Will I ever travel near enough,
+		far enough?&#8221; I have gone up and down the
+		world&#8212;seen the countless men and women in
+		it, standing on either side of their Abyss of
+		Circumstance, beckoning and reaching out.
+		I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn,
+		or old, casting their bread upon the waters,
+		grasping at sunsets or afterglows, putting their
+		souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem
+		to be flickering their lives out like Marconi messages
+		into a sort of infinite, swallowing human
+		space.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page172" name="page172"></a>172</span>Always this same wild aimless sea of living.
+		There does not seem to be a geography for love.
+		My soul answered me: &#8220;Did you expect a
+		world to be indexed? Life is steered by a Wind.
+		Blossoms and cyclones and sunshine and you
+		and I&#8212;all blundering along together.&#8221; &#8220;Let
+		every seed swell for itself,&#8221; the Universe has
+		said, in its first fine careless rapture. God is
+		merely having a good time. Why should I
+		go up and down a universe crying through it,
+		&#8220;Where are those that belong to me?&#8221; I have
+		looked at the stars swung out at me and they
+		have not answered, and now when I look at
+		the men, I have seemed to see them, every
+		man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands
+		before him, hinged on emptiness. &#8220;You are
+		alone,&#8221; the heart hath said. &#8220;Get up and be
+		your own brother. The world is a great WHO
+		CARES?&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>But when, in the middle of deep, helpless
+		sleep, tossed on the wide waters, I wake in a
+		ship, feel it trembling all through out there
+		with my brother&#8217;s care for me, I know that
+		this is not true. &#8220;Around sunsets, out through
+		the great dark,&#8221; I find myself saying, &#8220;he has
+		reached over and held me. Out here on this
+		high hill of water, under this low, touching
+		sky, I sleep.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake
+		silently, and feel gathered around. I wonder
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page173" name="page173"></a>173</span>if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the
+		button by my pillow. I listen to great cities
+		tending me. I have found all the earth paved,
+		or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with
+		my brother&#8217;s thoughts for me. I cannot hide
+		from love. He has hired oceans to do my
+		errands. He has made the whole human race
+		my house-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer
+		joy, thinking of the strange peoples where the
+		morning is, running to and fro for me, down
+		under the dark. Next me, the great quiet
+		throb of the engine&#8212;between me and infinite
+		space&#8212;beating comfortably. I cannot help
+		answering to it&#8212;this soft and mighty reaching
+		out where I lie.</p>
+
+		<p>My thoughts follow along the great twin
+		shafts my brother holds me with. I wonder
+		about them. I wish to do and share with them.</p>
+
+		<div class="poem">
+			<div class="stanza">
+				<p>Were I a spirit I would go</p>
+				<p>Where the murmuring axles of the screws</p>
+				<p>Along their whirling aisles</p>
+				<p>Break through the hold,</p>
+				<p>Where they lift the awful shining thews</p>
+				<p>Of Thought,</p>
+				<p>Of Trade,</p>
+				<p>And strike the Sea</p>
+				<p>Till the scar of London lies</p>
+				<p>Miles and miles upon its breast</p>
+				<p>Out in the West.</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+
+		<p>As I lie and look out of my port-hole and
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page174" name="page174"></a>174</span>watch the starlight stepping along the sea I
+		let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship
+		I am in&#8212;a little human beckoning between two
+		deserts. Out through my port-hole I seem to
+		see other ships, ghosts of great cities&#8212;an ocean
+		of them, creeping through their still huge picture
+		of the night, with their low hoarse whistles
+		meeting one another, whispering to one another
+		under the stars.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;And they are all mine,&#8221; I say, &#8220;hastening
+		gently.&#8221;</p>
+
+		<p>I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole
+		being float out upon the thought of it. The
+		bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived
+		a great life. It is as if I had been allowed to be
+		a great man a minute. I feel rested down
+		through to before I was born. The very stars,
+		after it, seem rested over my head. I have
+		gathered my universe about me. It is as if
+		I had lain all still in my soul and some
+		beautiful eternal sleep&#8212;a minute of it&#8212;had
+		come to me and visited me. All men are my
+		brothers. Is not the world filled with hastening
+		to me? What is there my brother has not done
+		for me? From the uttermost parts of the
+		morning, all things that are flow fresh and
+		beautiful upon my flesh. He has laid my will
+		on the heavens. His machines are like the
+		tides that do not stop. They are a part of the
+		vast antennƦ of the earth. They have grown
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page175" name="page175"></a>175</span>themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and
+		dust, they are a part of the furnishing of the
+		earth. If I am cold and seek furs Alaska is as
+		near as the next snowdrift. My brother has
+		caused it to be so. Everywhere is five cents
+		away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon from
+		Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With
+		the handle of my knife from India and the blade
+		from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas. Thousands
+		of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste
+		in my mouth, five or six continents have made
+		for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip of
+		my tongue.</p>
+
+		<p>And this is the thing my brother means, the
+		thing he has done for me, solitary. I keep
+		saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to
+		take it in&#8212;to feel the touch of the hands of
+		his hands. Does any one say this thing he is
+		doing is done for money&#8212;that it is not done
+		for comradeship or love? Could money have
+		thought of it or dared it or desired it? Could
+		all the money in the world ever pay him for it?
+		This paper-ticket I give him&#8212;for this berth I
+		lie in&#8212;does it pay him for it? Do I think to pay
+		my fare to the infinite?&#8212;I&#8212;a parasite of a
+		great roar in a city? These seven nights in the
+		hollow of his hand he has held me and let me
+		look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven&#8212;of
+		clouds. I have visited with the middle of the
+		sea.</p>
+
+		<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page176" name="page176"></a>176</span>And now with a thought, have I furnished
+		my hot plain and smoke forever.</p>
+
+		<p>I have not time to dream. I spell out each
+		night, before I sleep, some vast new far-off love,
+		this new daily sense of mutual service, this whole
+		round world to measure one&#8217;s being against.
+		Crowds wait on me in silence. I tip nations
+		with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie
+		in my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.</p>
+
+		<p>When I go out on the meadow at high noon
+		and in the great sleepy sunny silence there I
+		stand and watch that long imperious train go
+		by putting together the White Mountains and
+		New York, it is no longer as it was at first, a
+		mere train by itself to me,&#8212;a flash of parlor cars
+		between a great city and a sky up on Mt.
+		Washington. When it swings up between my
+		two little mountains its huge banner of steam
+		and smoke, it is the beckoning of The Other
+		Trains, the whole starful, creeping through the
+		Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes,
+		roaring through the sun or pounding through
+		the dark on the under sides of the world.</p>
+
+		<p>In the great silence on the meadow after the
+		train rolls by, it would be hard to be lonely
+		for a minute, not to stand still, not to share
+		in spirit around the earth a few of the big,
+		happy things&#8212;the far unseen peoples in the
+		sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the
+		statesmen, and poets, but always between
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page177" name="page177"></a>177</span>and above and beneath the streets and the
+		domes and the towers, and the statesmen and
+		poets&#8212;always the engineers,&#8212;I keep seeing them&#8212;these
+		men who dip up the world in their
+		hands, who sweep up life &#8230; long, narrow, little
+		towns of souls, and bowl them through the
+		Days and Nights.</p>
+
+		<p>In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern
+		world&#8212;one would rather be running the poems
+		than writing them. At night I turn in my
+		sleep. I hear the midnight mail go by&#8212;that same
+		still face before it, the great human headlight of
+		it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the
+		thunder of the Face has died away, I am still
+		wondering. Out there on the roof of the world,
+		thundering alone, thundering past death, past
+		glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding
+		away villages behind him (the strange, soft,
+		still little villages), pounding on the switch-lights,
+		scooping up the stations, the fresh strips
+		of earth and sky&#8230;. The cities swoon
+		before him &#8230; swoon past him. Thundering
+		past his own thunder, echoes dying away &#8230;
+		and now out in the great plain, out in the
+		fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid,
+		little black miles&#8230;. Every now and
+		then he thinks back over his shoulder, thinks
+		back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls.
+		He laughs bitterly at sleep, at the men with
+		tickets, at the way the men with tickets believe
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page178" name="page178"></a>178</span>in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the
+		lever) he is not infallible. Once &#8230; twice &#8230;
+		he might have &#8230; he almost&#8230;. Then suddenly
+		there is a flash ahead &#8230; he sets his
+		teeth, he reaches out with his soul &#8230; masters
+		it, he strains himself up to his infallibility again
+		&#8230; all those people there &#8230; fathers, mothers,
+		children, &#8230; sleeping on their arms full of
+		dreams. He feels as the minister feels, I
+		should think, when the bells have stopped on
+		a Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit
+		alone, alone before God &#8230; alone before the
+		Great Silence, and the people bow their
+		heads.</p>
+
+		<p>But I have found that it is not merely the
+		machines that one can see at a glance are
+		woven all through with men (like the great
+		trains) which make the big companions. It is
+		a mere matter of getting acquainted with the
+		machines and there is not one that is not woven
+		through with men, with dim faces of vanished
+		lives&#8212;with inventors.</p>
+
+		<p>I have seen great wheels, in steam and in
+		smoke, like swinging spirits of the dead. I have
+		been told that the inventors were no longer with
+		us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies
+		were tucked in cemeteries, in the crypts of
+		churches, but I have seen them with mighty
+		new ones in the night&#8212;in the broad day, in a
+		nameless silence, walk the earth. Inventors may
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page179" name="page179"></a>179</span>not be put like engineers, in show windows in
+		front of their machines, but they are all wrought
+		into them. From the first bit of cold steel on
+		the cowcatcher to the little last whiff of breath
+		in the air-brake, they are wrought in&#8212;fibre of
+		soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind
+		are wrought in the trees and rivers in the mountains,
+		they are there. There is not a machine
+		anywhere, that has not its crowd of men
+		in it, that is not full of laughter and hope
+		and tears. The machines give one some idea,
+		after a few years of listening, of what the inventors&#8217;
+		lives were like. One hears them&#8212;the
+		machines and the men, telling about each
+		other.</p>
+
+		<p>There are days when it has been given to me
+		to see the machines as inventors and prophets
+		see them.</p>
+
+		<p>On these days I have seen inventors handling
+		bits of wood and metal. I have seen them
+		taking up empires in their hands and putting
+		the future through their fingers.</p>
+
+		<p>On these days I have heard the machines
+		as the voices of great peoples singing in the
+		streets.</p>
+
+		<p class="thought_break">And after all, the finest and most perfect use
+		of machinery, I have come to think, is this one
+		the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily joy in
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page180" name="page180"></a>180</span>its presence. To have this communion with it
+		speaking around one, on sea and land, and in
+		the low boom of cities, to have all this vast
+		reaching out, earnest machinery of human life&#8212;sights
+		and sounds and symbols of it, beckoning
+		to one&#8217;s spirit day and night everywhere,
+		playing upon one the love and glory of the world&#8212;to
+		have&#8212;ah, well, when in the last great
+		moment of life I lay my universe out in order
+		around about me, and lie down to die, I shall
+		remember I have lived.</p>
+
+		<p>This great sorrowing civilization of ours,
+		which I had seen before, always sorrowing at
+		heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive
+		energy in it, has come to me and lived
+		with me, and let me see the look of the future
+		in its face.</p>
+
+		<p>And now I dare look up. For a moment&#8212;for
+		a moment that shall live forever&#8212;I have
+		seen once, I think&#8212;at least once, this great
+		radiant gesturing of Man around the edges of a
+		world. I shall not die, now, solitary. And
+		when my time shall come and I lie down to
+		do it, oh, unknown faces that shall wait with
+		me,&#8212;let it not be with drawn curtains nor
+		with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and
+		silence and darkness. Do not shut out the
+		great heartless-sounding, forgetting-looking roar
+		of life. Rather let the windows be opened.
+		And then with the voice of mills and of the
+		<span class="pagenum"><a id="page181" name="page181"></a>181</span>mighty street&#8212;all the din and wonder of it,&#8212;with
+		the sound in my ears of my big brother
+		outside living his great life around his little
+		earth, I will fall asleep.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page182" name="page182"></a>182</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<div id="end_matter">
+	<div id="birds_eye_view">
+	<h2 class="end_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page183" name="page183"></a>183</span>BIRD&#8217;S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK</h2>
+	<p><span class="pagenum blank_page"><a id="page184" name="page184"></a>184</span></p>
+	<h3 class="end_part_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page185" name="page185"></a>185</span>PART ONE</h3>
+	<p>I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in
+	with its ancient rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets,
+	or with bouquets and doilies and songs of birds. It is
+	a man&#8217;s word, says The Twentieth Century. &#8220;If
+	a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers
+	a hill.&#8221;</p>
+
+	<p>II. The modern literary man&#8212;slow to be converted,
+	is already driven to his task. Living in an
+	age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are getting their
+	living out of machines, or putting their living into
+	them, he is not content with a definition of beauty
+	which shuts down under the floor of the world nine
+	tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves him standing by
+	himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where&#8212;except
+	by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway
+	he has no way of communing with his kind.</p>
+
+	<p>III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret
+	them for the soul or the manhood of the men about
+	him he sees that after a little while&#8212;in the great
+	desert of machines, there will not be any men.
+	A little while after that there will not be any machines.
+	He has come to feel that the whole problem
+	of civilization turns on it&#8212;on what seems at first
+	<span class="pagenum"><a id="page186" name="page186"></a>186</span>sight an abstract or literary theory&#8212;that there is
+	poetry in machines. If we cannot find a great hope
+	or a great meaning for the machine-idea in its simplest
+	form, the machines of steel and flame that minister
+	to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a
+	machine simply because it is a machine, there is not
+	going to be anything left in modern life with which to
+	connect inspiring ideas. All our great spiritual values
+	are being operated as machines. To take the stand
+	that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be
+	connected with machinery is to take a stand for the
+	continued existence of modern religion (in all reverence)
+	the God-machine, for modern education, the man-machine,
+	for modern government, the crowd-machine,
+	for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,
+	and for modern society&#8212;the machine in which the
+	crowd lives.</p>
+
+	<p>IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of
+	fact. The literary men who know the men who
+	know the machines, the men who live with them, the
+	inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts
+	about the poetry in machinery. The real problem
+	that stands in the way of interpreting and bringing
+	out the poetry in machinery, instead of being a literary
+	or Ʀsthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting
+	people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a
+	poet.</p>
+
+	<p>VI. The inventor is working out the passions and
+	the freedoms of the people, the tools of the nations.</p>
+
+	<p>The people are already coming to look upon the inventor
+	under our modern conditions as the new form of
+	prophet. If what we call literature cannot interpret
+	the tools that men are daily doing their living with,
+	literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as
+	men are more creative and godlike in engines than
+	<span class="pagenum"><a id="page187" name="page187"></a>187</span>they are in poems the world listens to engines. If
+	what we call the church cannot interpret machines,
+	the church as a form of religion loses its leadership
+	until it does. A church that can only see what a
+	few of the men born in an age, are for, can only
+	help a few. A religion that lives in a machine-age
+	and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age,
+	is not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our
+	machines. One of the machines that we have made
+	could make a better religion than this.</p>
+
+	<h3 class="end_part_number">PART TWO</h3>
+	<p class="end_part_title">THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES</p>
+	<p>I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called
+	poetic it must have great ideas in it and must successfully
+	express them; that the language of the machines,
+	considered as an expression of the ideas that are
+	in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all
+	language looked at in the outside way that men have
+	looked at machines, is irrelevant and absurd. We
+	listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of an archangel
+	with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people
+	who have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate
+	than kissing as a form of human expression, between
+	two immortal infinite human beings.</p>
+
+	<p>II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine
+	as well as of everything else that is strictly
+	modern is that it refuses to show off. The man who
+	is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not
+	feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas
+	that belong with it, is not seeing it. The poetry is
+	under water.</p>
+
+	<p>III. I have heard it said that the modern man
+	<span class="pagenum"><a id="page188" name="page188"></a>188</span>does not care for poetry. It would be truer to say
+	that he does not care for old-fashioned poetry&#8212;the
+	poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch windmill
+	flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly
+	modern man. The idle foolish look of a magnet
+	appeals to him more. Its language is more expressive
+	and penetrating. He has learned that in proportion
+	as a machine or anything else is expressive&#8212;in the
+	modern language, it hides. The more perfect or
+	poetic he makes his machines the more spiritual they
+	become. His utmost machines are electric. Electricity
+	is the modern man&#8217;s prophet. It sums up his
+	world. It has the modern man&#8217;s temperament&#8212;the
+	passion of being invisible and irresistible.</p>
+
+	<p>IV. Poetry and religion consist&#8212;at bottom, in
+	being proud of God. Most men to-day are worshipping
+	God&#8212;at least in secret, not merely because
+	of this great Machine that He has made, running softly
+	above us&#8212;moonlight and starlight &#8230; but because
+	He has made a Machine that can make machines, a
+	machine that shall take more of the dust of the earth
+	and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel
+	and iron and say &#8220;Go ye now,&#8212;depths of the earth,
+	heights of heaven&#8212;serve ye me! Stones and mists,
+	winds and waters and thunder&#8212;the spirit that is in
+	thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!&#8221;</p>
+
+	<p>V. Everything has its language and the power of
+	feeling what a thing means, by the way it looks, is a
+	matter of noticing, of learning the language. The
+	language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely
+	know whether the machines are expressing their ideas
+	or not. I only know that when I stand before a
+	foundry hammering out the floors of the world, clashing
+	its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my soul
+	to it, and in some way&#8212;I know not how, while it sings
+	to me, I grow strong and glad.</p>
+
+	<h3 class="end_part_number"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page189" name="page189"></a>189</span>PART THREE</h3>
+	<p class="end_part_title">THE MACHINES AS POETS</p>
+	<p>I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses
+	the soul of man&#8212;of a whole world of men.</p>
+
+	<p>It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual
+	soul of the individual man who creates the Machine&#8212;the
+	inventor, and the man who lives with the machine&#8212;the
+	engineer.</p>
+
+	<p>It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the
+	kind of God who can make men who can make machines.</p>
+
+	<p>III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in
+	expressing the man&#8217;s soul it expresses the greatest idea
+	that the soul of man can have&#8212;the man&#8217;s sense of being
+	related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not merely because
+	it makes the man think he is infinite but because
+	it is making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When
+	I hear the machines, I hear Man saying, &#8220;God and I.&#8221;</p>
+
+	<p>V. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing
+	the infinity of man it expresses the two great immeasurable
+	ideas of poetry and of the imagination
+	and of the soul in all ages&#8212;the two forms of infinity&#8212;the
+	liberty and the unity of man.</p>
+
+	<p>The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.</p>
+
+	<p>A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its
+	form reveals the nature of its substance, that is, conveys
+	its idea.</p>
+
+	<p>Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable
+	ideas consummately expressed.</p>
+
+	<h3 class="end_part_number">PART FOUR</h3>
+	<p class="end_part_title">THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES</p>
+	<p>The ideas of machinery in their several phases are
+	sketched in chapters as follows:</p>
+
+	<p>I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the
+	body of the man.</p>
+
+	<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page190" name="page190"></a>190</span>III. The idea of liberty&#8212;the soul&#8217;s rescue from
+	environment.</p>
+
+	<p>IV. The idea of immortality.</p>
+
+	<p>V. The idea of God.</p>
+
+	<p>VI. The idea of the Spirit&#8212;of the Unseen and
+	Intangible.</p>
+
+	<p>VII. The practical idea of invoking great men.</p>
+
+	<p>VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship.</p>
+
+	<p class="thought_break">Note.&#8212;The present volume is the first of a series
+	which had their beginnings in some articles in the
+	<i>Atlantic</i> a few years ago, answering or trying to answer
+	the question, &#8220;Can a machine age have a soul?&#8221;
+	Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as
+	it stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that
+	the various phases and implications of machinery&#8212;the
+	general bearing of machinery in our modern life,
+	upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the
+	arts, are being considered in a series of three volumes
+	called:</p>
+
+	<p>I. The Voice of the Machines.</p>
+
+	<p>II. Machines and Millionaires.</p>
+
+	<p>III. Machines and Crowds.</p>
+
+	</div>
+
+	<div id="advertisement">
+	<h2 class="end_title"><span class="pagenum"><a id="page191" name="page191"></a>191</span>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</h2>
+	<div class="ad">
+		<p><span class="ad_title">ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH</span>. <span class="ad_price">$1.00</span>. &#8220;I
+		have read it twice and enjoyed it the second time even more than the
+		first.&#8221;&#8212;<span class="reviewer_style_1">Oliver Wendell Holmes</span>.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made
+		me as hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of
+		laughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us
+		I do not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as
+		I would a note&#8212;right across the face and present it for payment in
+		any man&#8217;s library.&#8221;&#8212;<span class="reviewer_style_1">Robert J. Burdette</span>.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="ad">
+		<p><span class="ad_title">THE CHILD AND THE BOOK</span>. <span class="ad_price">$.75</span>. (<span class="ad_publisher">G. P. Putnam&#8217;s Sons</span>.)
+		&#8220;I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm
+		I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is
+		the most brilliant book of any season since Carlyle&#8217;s and Emerson&#8217;s
+		pens were laid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric
+		in form, and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who
+		is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly
+		alive&#8230;.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud
+		cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now.
+		It makes me believe that after all we haven&#8217;t a great kindergarten
+		about us in authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us
+		yet. I can conceive that the date of the publication of this book
+		may well be the date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for
+		which we have long been scanning the horizon.&#8221;&#8212;<span class="reviewer_style_2">Wm. Sloane Kennedy</span>,
+		in <i>Boston Transcript</i>.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="ad">
+		<p><span class="ad_title">THE LOST ART OF READING</span>. <span class="ad_price">$1.00</span>. (<span class="ad_publisher">G. P. Putnam&#8217;s
+		Sons</span>.) &#8220;It is a real pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat
+		among the books of the day. Some of us will shrug at this volume.
+		Others of us having read it will keep it near us.&#8221;&#8212;<i>Life.</i></p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what
+		some people are a little alarmed even to think.&#8221;&#8212;<i>Springfield Republican.</i></p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;You get right in between the covers and live.&#8221;&#8212;<i>Denver Post.</i></p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="ad">
+		<p><span class="ad_title">THE SHADOW CHRIST</span>. <span class="ad_price">$1.25</span>. (<span class="ad_publisher">The Century Co.</span>) &#8220;Let
+		me be one of the first to recognize in this book what every man who
+		reads it thoughtfully will feel. Heaps of the books that have been
+		written about the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust.
+		They are the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a
+		man appears who makes his way straight into the Promised Land,
+		by sea if necessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be
+		a full, precise treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision.
+		Theology expressed in a lyric. Criticism condensed into an epigram.&#8221;&#8212;<span class="reviewer_style_2">Dr.
+		Henry van Dyke</span>, in <i>The Book Buyer</i>.</p>
+
+		<p>&#8220;The author&#8217;s name&#8212;Gerald Stanley Lee&#8212;has been hitherto
+		unknown to us in England, but the book he has here offered to the
+		world indicates that he has that in him which will soon make it
+		familiar.&#8221;&#8212;<i>The Christian World</i> (London).</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="ad">
+		<p><span class="ad_title">MOUNT TOM</span>. <span class="emphasized">An all outdoors magazine</span>, devoted to rest
+		and worship, and to a little look-off on the world.</p>
+
+		<p>Edited by Mr. <span class="emphasized">Lee</span>. Every other month. 12 copies, $1.00.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="ad">
+		<p><span class="ad_title">THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES</span>. <span class="ad_price">$1.25</span>. (<span class="ad_publisher">Mt. Tom Press</span>.)</p>
+	</div>
+
+	<div class="ad_ending">
+		<p>Any of the above mailed postpaid ordered direct from<br />
+		The Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Mass.</p>
+	</div>
+
+	</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by 
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Voice of the Machines
+       An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
+
+Author: Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+Release Date: January 15, 2007 [EBook #20361]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lee Spector and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+The Voice of the Machines
+
+An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
+
+
+BY
+
+
+Gerald Stanley Lee
+
+
+The Mount Tom Press
+Northampton, Massachusetts
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1906
+BY
+THE MOUNT TOM PRESS
+
+
+
+
+TO JENNETTE LEE
+
+  ... "Now and then my fancy caught
+  A flying glimpse of a good life beyond--
+  Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing,
+  Troy falling, and the ages coming back,
+  And ages coming forward."...
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+     I.--Machines as Seen from a Meadow
+    II.--As Seen through a Hatchway
+   III.--The Souls of Machines
+    IV.--Poets
+     V.--Gentlemen
+    VI.--Prophets
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
+
+     I.--As Good as Ours
+    II.--On Being Busy and Still
+   III.--On Not Showing Off
+    IV.--On Making People Proud of the World
+     V.--A Modest Universe
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE MACHINES AS POETS
+
+     I.--Plato and the General Electric Works
+    II.--Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth
+   III.--The Grudge against the Infinite
+    IV.--Symbolism in Modern Art
+     V.--The Machines as Artists
+    VI.--The Machines as Philosophers
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+     I.--The Idea of Incarnation
+    II.--The Idea of Size
+   III.--The Idea of Liberty
+    IV.--The Idea of Immortality
+     V.--The Idea of God
+    VI.--The Idea of the Unseen and the Intangible
+   VII.--The Idea of Great Men
+  VIII.--The Idea of Love and Comradeship
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MACHINES. AS SEEN FROM A MEADOW
+
+
+It would be difficult to find anything in the encyclopedia that would
+justify the claim that we are about to make, or anything in the
+dictionary. Even a poem--which is supposed to prove anything with a
+little of nothing--could hardly be found to prove it; but in this
+beginning hour of the twentieth century there are not a few of us--for
+the time at least allowed to exist upon the earth--who are obliged to
+say (with Luther), "Though every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, we
+cannot say otherwise--the locomotive is beautiful."
+
+As seen when one is looking at it as it is, and is not merely using
+it.
+
+As seen from a meadow.
+
+We had never thought to fall so low as this, or that the time would
+come when we would feel moved--all but compelled, in fact--to betray
+to a cold and discriminating world our poor, pitiful, one-adjective
+state.
+
+We do not know why a locomotive is beautiful. We are perfectly aware
+that it ought not to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for being
+beautiful--and of ourselves. We have attempted all possible words upon
+it--the most complimentary and worthy ones we know--words with the
+finer resonance in them, and the air of discrimination the soul loves.
+We cannot but say that several of these words from time to time have
+seemed almost satisfactory to our ears. They seem satisfactory also
+for general use in talking with people, and for introducing
+locomotives in conversation; but the next time we see a locomotive
+coming down the track, there is no help for us. We quail before the
+headlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as the voice of the
+hurrying people. Our little row of adjectives is vanished. All
+adjectives are vanished. They are as one.
+
+Unless the word "beautiful" is big enough to make room for a glorious,
+imperious, world-possessing, world-commanding beauty like this, we are
+no longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behind
+truth. Let it be shut in with its rim of hills--the word
+beautiful--its show of sunsets and its bouquets and its doilies and
+its songs of birds. We are seekers for a new word. It is the first
+hour of the twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so is the
+locomotive that conquers a hill. So is the telephone, piercing a
+thousand sunsets north to south, with the sound of a voice. The night
+is not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over the city, than the
+electric spark pushing the night one side, that the city may behold
+itself; and the hour is at hand--is even now upon us--when not the sun
+itself shall be more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping the
+sun in the midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while the
+will of a child to another child ticks round the earth. "Time shall be
+folded up as a scroll," saith the voice of Man, my Brother. "The
+spaces between the hills, to ME," saith the Voice, "shall be as though
+they were not."
+
+The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.
+
+It is the voice of the machines.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY
+
+
+In its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its
+conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented
+fact. The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a
+traditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life
+to-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out.
+Leaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the
+people of the world have had to be left out with it.
+
+Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see
+poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.
+
+The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his
+mother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards,
+he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by
+a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were
+built in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food has
+come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him
+by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the
+clothes he wears was flashed together by looms.
+
+The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion
+and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds
+that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a
+machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels
+or of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great
+whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the
+system--that is, the Machine--be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or
+spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the
+beginning of the world.
+
+The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a
+huge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main
+fact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very
+well, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may
+be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He
+learns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe,
+turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a
+life, will hardly be inclined to stop--to wait perchance--to ask him
+what he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He
+looks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of
+Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to
+the machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past
+him night and day,--miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked
+into the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it
+in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes
+around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full
+of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.
+
+He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All men," says Political
+Economy, "may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the
+other of three great classes of activity--production, consumption or
+distribution."
+
+The number of persons who are engaged in production outside of
+association with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one
+place, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of
+human beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities.
+
+The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of
+association with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few
+peddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.
+
+The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of
+association with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as
+consumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could be
+stopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be
+loaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the
+coal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed by
+another set of machines.
+
+So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs
+and wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found
+on the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to
+live this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him
+where he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his
+life, to see the sky--to be sure there was a sky. It is then his
+privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running
+belts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what this
+heaven is, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walled
+in forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels.
+
+"No inspiring emotions," says the literary definition, "ideas or
+conceptions can possibly be connected with machinery--or ever will
+be."
+
+What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of
+its natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the
+roof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the
+way of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that
+we, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally
+safe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take
+comfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around
+us. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our
+gates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows
+herds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the
+morning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have
+done what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have
+laid the boundary line of beauty?... The huge, hurrying, helpless
+world in its belts and spindles--the people who are going to be
+obliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little
+more--all this--the great strenuous problem--the defense of beauty,
+the saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of it
+with life-all these?... Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the
+noises of the street. A little longer ... the low singing to
+ourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our graves
+shall be as the passing of silence.
+
+Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society of
+his kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he
+wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not
+know. I only know how it is now.
+
+  They stay not in their hold
+  These stokers,
+  Stooping to hell
+  To feed a ship.
+  Below the ocean floors,
+  Before their awful doors
+  Bathed in flame,
+  I hear their human lives
+  Drip--drip.
+
+  Through the lolling aisles of comrades
+  In and out of sleep,
+  Troops of faces
+  To and fro of happy feet,
+  They haunt my eyes.
+  Their murky faces beckon me
+  From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
+  Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SOULS OF MACHINES
+
+
+It does not make very much difference to the machines whether there is
+poetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.
+
+It is not an abstract question to the people who are under the
+machines. Men who are under things want to know what the things are
+for, and they want to know what they are under them for. It is a very
+live, concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetry
+in machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it.
+
+There seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this world
+or the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is
+not bound up, in our modern age, with machinery. With the fate of
+machinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the
+characteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age is
+organization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little
+to be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the
+principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired
+principle--if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be
+expressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it--there is
+little to be hoped for in modern education.
+
+Modern government is a machine. The more modern a government is, the
+more the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It is
+made up of (1) corporations--huge machines employing machines, and (2)
+of trusts--huge machines that control machines that employ machines.
+Modern charity is a machine for getting people to help each other.
+Modern society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other.
+Modern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modern journalism
+is a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine for
+supplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machines
+cannot supply.
+
+Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable
+thing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better
+or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes
+little difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It
+has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for.
+We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We
+are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We
+breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more
+than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes,
+even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in
+machinery--that is if there is no beautiful and glorious
+interpretation of machinery for our modern life--there cannot be
+poetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of
+the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be.
+If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something,
+we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above
+our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are
+empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of
+darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our
+whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a
+Machine Age have a soul?
+
+If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea
+in its simplest form, for machinery itself--that is, the machines of
+steel and flame that minister to us--it will be possible to find a
+great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we
+have already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other
+machines--our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered--the
+better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that
+inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with
+machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern
+religion--(in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern
+education--the man-machine; for modern government--the crowd-machine;
+for modern art--the machine in which the crowd lives.
+
+If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because
+it is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modern
+world to connect inspiring ideas with.
+
+Johnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and
+shadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and
+looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a
+mist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps
+past. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it
+is as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in
+the wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled
+with childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to
+wonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown
+to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world
+lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over
+on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania--for its days and nights.
+I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen
+men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on
+a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the
+making and the welding place of the bones of the world.
+
+It is the object of this present writing to search out a world--a
+world a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know
+it and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be
+written across the world once more--written across this year of the
+world in the roar of its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannot
+quite see the word YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we
+hear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the
+machines themselves.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+POETS
+
+
+When, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modern
+life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the
+thing we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideas
+practical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that "it will always
+be practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal
+to the imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the
+real spirit we know exists in the real world.
+
+Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth century.
+
+Expectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are
+now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the
+earth.
+
+The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of
+John Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something of
+the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer
+of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this
+same age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of
+poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be
+lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead,
+this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more
+kinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the
+daring of their dreams.
+
+Pessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being in
+the real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of not
+being in enough of the real world.
+
+If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy
+expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall
+we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument?
+the minor poet?
+
+The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the
+doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first
+by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the
+door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and
+humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth
+playing upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of the
+mere outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of the
+thing called life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. He
+shall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over by
+machines--shadowed by weariness--to the men about him half comrade,
+half monk--going in and out among them silently, with some secret
+glory in his heart.
+
+If literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, who
+are putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers and
+brakemen--as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club,
+there would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--_i. e._, a
+great hope or great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that stands
+in the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor aesthetic. It is
+sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a
+gentleman and a poet.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+GENTLEMEN
+
+
+The truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his
+work. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves
+his work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a
+gentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own employer.
+No matter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail
+to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is master
+of the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man who
+loves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make a
+man free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the
+ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what
+a gentleman's work is worth.
+
+The poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it,
+the men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that
+these men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of
+them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They
+cannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the
+autobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for him,
+possessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.
+
+Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number
+employed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than
+there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative
+in creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else
+there are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the fine
+arts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shops
+can hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather be
+preachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the much
+larger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemen
+in the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they would
+do the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing,
+and make every one else respect it.
+
+While the definition of a poet and a gentleman--that he is a man who
+loves his work--might appear to make a new division of society, it is
+a division that already exists in the actual life of the world, and
+constitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had.
+
+It may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter how
+prosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon this
+planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the
+most hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing
+in his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in
+spite of himself, and whether he knows it or not.
+
+So long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to
+him, so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal,
+the heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty and the
+unconquerableness of that man, and of that man's delight, shall be
+upon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all
+on earth who overhear heaven.
+
+Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal
+connected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet.
+It makes little difference what he says about it. In proportion as he
+has power with a thing; in proportion as he makes the thing--be it a
+bit of color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, or
+a throttle--in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or express
+what he wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and
+earth cannot make him otherwise.
+
+That the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward the
+machine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the
+apparent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in
+all essential respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has ever
+known an inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feeling
+toward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know that
+men are living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (their
+faces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but
+dying now, this very moment, to make a machine live,--martyrs of
+valves and wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, tireless,
+unconquerable men?
+
+To know an inventor the moment of his triumph,--the moment when,
+working his will before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent,
+massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls
+and the needs of their bodies,--to know an inventor at all is to know
+that at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep,
+soft as from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that
+Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and
+watching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and
+joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make,
+from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is,
+after all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and
+cog and wheel--is it not more than these to him standing before it
+there? It is the face of matter--who does not know it?--answering the
+face of the man, whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.
+
+What is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the
+men who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer and
+the mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Their
+days are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same
+unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They
+begin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and
+wheels, or of great waters.
+
+As I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was
+holding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag,
+and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him,
+headlight, clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every
+brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the
+switch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and
+gave the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched
+them, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid
+cloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to
+the Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the
+falling of smoke.
+
+Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot
+that was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a
+brakeman himself.
+
+Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but
+they love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to
+brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that
+their ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds
+of lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the
+outside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening
+lights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their
+endless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It is
+wrought into the very fibre of their being.
+
+Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the
+brakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see
+them--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and
+rocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.
+
+They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of
+their calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.
+
+Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the
+universe, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and
+stand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives
+the secret that throbs through it all.
+
+For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an
+ideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a
+life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this
+also is to have lived.
+
+The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad
+man that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest
+pertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of
+the present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much a
+symbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of
+the art of an heroic age.
+
+That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships,
+to turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years
+old. We find it accounted for not only in the observation and
+experience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do
+it at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets have
+admitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before
+mountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When the
+sailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on the
+decks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minor
+poets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and
+obliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close
+to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If
+he must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he
+selects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at
+night singing to his bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.
+There is not a passenger on the Empire State Express, this moment,
+being whirled to the West, who could not write a sonnet on it,--not a
+man of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through space
+behind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and
+write a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street
+could write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was
+dead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time to
+bring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still
+alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it is
+going to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns
+of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe
+where poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world,
+and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor
+and unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man
+who would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than
+to have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from
+the old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger
+where she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. He
+spends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in and
+out, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, and
+talking with them. Nothing can take him away.
+
+Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection
+for his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her
+breath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle of
+that ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who
+shall seek to define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory,
+in darkness or in day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of
+life. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in his
+engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to place
+his hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that
+this awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare to
+touch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour
+muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this,
+climbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It is
+impossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touch
+sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind can
+go, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the
+west--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because
+he means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a
+poet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,
+hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I
+always see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through
+the Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.
+
+Who am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to
+speak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that
+I should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling
+track--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the
+man in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he
+wears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and
+the cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words
+enough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life.
+Standing in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrill
+to his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of
+the splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of his
+life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as the
+singing a man would sing who felt his hand on the throttle of things.
+The engine is a soul to me--soul of the quiet face thundering
+past--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling it
+to the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it to
+the trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, that
+the might of the spirit of man has passed that way.
+
+If an engine is to be looked at from the point of view of the man who
+makes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a
+right to be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression of
+the human spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the human
+spirit, there shall be no escape for the children of this present
+world, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in it
+that shall hem life in, and bound it round on every side. The idealism
+and passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling he
+has about his machine, the power with which that machine expresses
+that feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations of this
+modern age, a fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulate
+and far and faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now from
+above, and now from below, and on every side of life. It is as though
+the very ground itself should speak,--speak to our poor, pitiful,
+unspiritual, matter-despising souls,--should command them to come
+forth, to live, to gaze into the heart of matter for the heart of God.
+It is so that the very dullest of us, standing among our machines, can
+hardly otherwise than guess the coming of some vast surprise,--the
+coming of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, our sons and
+daughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and our
+old men shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I do not dare to say
+it. What it means to our religion and to our life and to our art, this
+great athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I only know that so
+long as the fine arts, in an age like this, look down on the
+mechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so long
+as the church worships the laborer's God, but does not reverence
+labor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and none for
+women and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as there is no
+poet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this man, my
+brother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the engine
+shall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it shall
+be buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we have
+more preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into life
+insurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave their
+engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than in
+pulpits,--the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons
+say. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we
+shall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we
+fain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand
+choirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a
+fragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in
+the delight of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made
+a vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every
+word have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long
+as men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in
+sermons, I listen to engines.
+
+Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So
+it cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,
+blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,
+with all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of
+life sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be
+worshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love is
+her love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of the
+engineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is
+beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glass
+window is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is bound
+to come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great rough
+hand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the new
+church shall be known by men because it will be a day in which all
+worship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy house
+shall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries under
+the sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid at
+her feet.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+PROPHETS
+
+
+The world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating,
+the strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in
+poetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the
+church, religion will call itself something else. It is the business
+of a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were some
+other age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born in
+it is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in an
+age are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in a
+particular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries to
+do for him the better. If a church does not believe in a man's work as
+he believes in it, does not see some divine meaning and spirit in it
+and give him honor and standing and dignity for the divine meaning in
+it; if it is a church in which labor is secretly despised and in which
+it is openly patronized, in which a man has more honor for working
+feebly with his brain than for working passionately and perfectly with
+his hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. It is
+excommunicated by the will of Heaven and the nature of things, from
+the only Communion that is large enough for a man to belong to or for
+a God to bless.
+
+If there is one sign rather than another of religious possibility and
+spiritual worth in the men who do the world's work with machines
+to-day, it is that these men are never persuaded to attend a church
+that despises that work.
+
+Symposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is no
+need for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the
+house-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church
+that believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership
+in the world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the man who sings with
+his hands, "to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men who
+do not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?" If heaven
+itself (represented as a rich and idle place,--seats free in the
+evening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that he
+should despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find some
+excuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard to
+his present life. "Unless your God," says the man who sings with his
+hands, to those who pity him and do him good,--"unless your God is a
+God I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in a
+church."
+
+Behold it is written: The church that does not delight in these men
+and in what these men are for, as much as the street delights in them,
+shall give way to the street. The street is more beautiful. If the
+street is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church and
+sweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above
+it. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall men
+look down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than the
+world believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. It
+cannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, and
+that cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of
+that machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not
+worthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a
+better religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every
+town or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,
+one hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for
+more than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.
+The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other
+great believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are
+surrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the
+steeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the
+people. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of
+chimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are
+saying to the people.
+
+They will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.
+
+They will say it better.
+
+In the meantime they are not listening.
+
+Religion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with
+their ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By
+all poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading
+before them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that
+reaches across the age.
+
+      RAILROAD CROSSING
+    LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+AS GOOD AS OURS
+
+
+One is always hearing it said that if a thing is to be called poetic
+it must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them.
+The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection
+that, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not look
+it." The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it
+stands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language of
+the average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it is
+actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is often
+absurd. It is a rare machine which, when one looks for poetry in it,
+does not make itself ridiculous.
+
+The only answer that can be made to this objection is that a
+steam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as well
+as the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We
+live in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything
+in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over
+our heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height of
+absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when
+we look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at
+strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To
+suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose
+that He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express
+anything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.
+
+We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of
+everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do
+our living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselves
+with--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and
+football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them
+from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey
+anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying
+on a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense
+and spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a
+new fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it,
+to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the
+beginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could
+not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more
+futile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul
+than a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may
+be all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a
+failure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musical
+instruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing a
+black stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listen
+solemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tucked
+under his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughing
+and crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language of
+the violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivated
+enough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful and
+important parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracy
+of symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that
+can not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing
+could possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a
+tourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebration
+of the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have their
+outer senses, and these outer senses have to be learned one at a time
+by being flashed through with inner ones. Except to people who have
+tried it, nothing could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form of
+human expression. A reception--a roomful of people shouting at each
+other three inches away--is comical enough. So is handshaking. Looked
+at from the outside, what could be more unimpressive than the
+spectacle of the greatest dignitary of the United States put in a vise
+in his own house for three hours, having his hand squeezed by long
+rows of people? And, taken as a whole, scurrying about in its din,
+what could possibly be more grotesque than a great city--a city looked
+at from almost any adequate, respectable place for an immortal soul to
+look from--a star, for instance, or a beautiful life?
+
+Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels, every outer token that
+pertains to man is absurd and unfinished until some inner thing is put
+with it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to the other
+animals), rushing empty about space. New York is a spectacle for a
+squirrel to laugh at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man is
+a mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, desk-infesting animal.
+
+All these things being true of expression--both the expression of men
+and of God--the fact that machines which have poetry in them do not
+express it very well does not trouble me much. I do not forget the
+look of the first ocean-engine I ever saw--four or five stories of it;
+nor do I forget the look of the ocean-engine's engineer as in its
+mighty heart-beat he stood with his strange, happy, helpless "Twelve
+thousand horse-power, sir!" upon his lips.
+
+That first night with my first engineer still follows me. The time
+seems always coming back to me again when he brought me up from his
+whirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of stars, and left me--my new
+wonder all stumbling through me--alone with them and with my thoughts.
+
+  The engines breathe.
+  No sound but cinders on the sails
+  And the ghostly heave,
+  The voice the wind makes in the mast--
+  And dainty gales
+  And fluffs of mist and smoking stars
+  Floating past--
+  From night-lit funnels.
+
+  In the wild of the heart of God I stand.
+  Time and Space
+  Wheel past my face.
+  Forever. Everywhere.
+  I alone.
+  Beyond the Here and There
+  Now and Then
+  Of men,
+  Winds from the unknown
+  Round me blow
+  Blow to the unknown again.
+
+  Out in its solitude I hear the prow
+  Beyond the silence-crowded decks
+  Laughing and shouting
+  At Night,
+  Lashing the heads and necks
+  Of the lifted seas,
+  That in their flight
+  Urge onward
+  And rise and sweep and leap and sink
+  To the very brink
+  Of Heaven.
+
+  Timber and steel and smoke
+  And Sleep
+  Thousand-souled
+  A quiver,
+  A deadened thunder,
+  A vague and countless creep
+  Through the hold,
+  The weird and dusky chariot lunges on
+  Through Fate.
+  From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes
+  Above the houses of the deep
+  Their shadowy haunches fall and rise
+  --O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs
+  The flying of their hoofs,
+  Through the wonder and the dark
+  Where skies and waters meet
+  The shimmer of manes and knees
+  Dust of seas...
+  The sound of breathing, urge, confusion
+  And the beat, the starlight beat
+  Soft and far and stealthy-fleet
+  Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ON BEING BUSY AND STILL
+
+
+One of the hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines
+(excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the
+phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed
+to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey,
+and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being
+impressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed
+because it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked
+through its nose.
+
+The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to
+know it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his
+imagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the
+outside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a
+twin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.
+This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its
+poetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in
+the big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy
+paddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in
+the sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.
+
+People who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit that
+there is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A
+Dutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved so
+much that it does not flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it
+at all. The same general principle holds good with every machine that
+has been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works on
+it, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, if
+one watches it in its various stages, always consists in making a
+machine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive,
+puffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, was
+much more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the present
+one, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was more
+impressive than the present one. Every one remembers it,--the
+important-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty
+years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaseless
+water-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and its
+huge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations,
+ringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It was
+impossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without always
+thinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was always
+doing things--now at one end of the train and now at the other,
+ringing its bell down the track, blowing in at the windows, it fumed
+and spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to get
+to Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines
+were made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, and
+scarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he is
+going, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that.
+
+The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silent
+ones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of
+space--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting the
+world--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, for
+the very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are less
+showy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect.
+
+In proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses to
+look as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost always
+a sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some one
+else. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is a
+giant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding,
+is not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists at
+all in the modern age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it
+exists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep bass
+steamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam,
+which any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fashioned
+poetry. Every time it whistled it stopped.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+ON NOT SHOWING OFF
+
+
+It is not true to say that the modern man does not care for poetry. He
+does not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. He
+cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care for
+eloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks
+to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts,
+and if the votes are to be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The
+doctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the most
+agreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like the
+doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He even prescribes less,
+and the reason that it is hard to be a modern minister (already cut
+down from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is that
+one has to practise more than one can preach.
+
+To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more than
+one says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelve
+hundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life around
+them is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out
+in the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life.
+The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people who
+have a gift for praying that way go, but the majority of
+people--people who have discovered that there are a thousand other
+ways of praying, and who like them better--stay away.
+
+When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed
+on the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The
+messages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all
+improves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of
+a hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is
+his duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough
+one--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from
+the inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on
+the outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like
+selfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it
+counts.
+
+On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the
+twentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not
+been known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a
+glass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to
+discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the
+ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would
+not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact
+that Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new
+heaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of
+it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope
+invented later, which never worked.
+
+Nothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R----
+typewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must
+have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The
+machine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and
+ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line
+with his foot.
+
+The same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery
+and through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The
+overshot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion,
+literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common men
+began to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came
+in--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no
+denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its
+work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but
+it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the
+drippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the
+turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work.
+The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand
+horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as
+six turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the
+Falls.
+
+The main fact about the modern man as regards poetry is, that he
+prefers poetry that has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It is
+because most of the poetry the modern man gets a chance to see to-day
+is merely going over the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal
+to the modern man. He supposes so himself. He supposes that a dynamo
+(forty street-cars on forty streets, flying through the dark) is not
+poetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, spellbound, more
+than any poetry that is being written. The things that are hidden--the
+things that are spiritual and wondering--are the ones that appeal to
+him. The idle, foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He gropes in
+his own body silently, harmlessly with the X-ray, and watches with awe
+the beating of his heart. He glories in inner essences, both in his
+life and in his art. He is the disciple of the X-ray, the defier of
+appearances. Why should a man who has seen the inside of matter care
+about appearances, either in little things or great? Or why argue
+about the man, or argue about the man's God, or quibble with words?
+Perhaps he is matter. Perhaps he is spirit. If he is spirit, he is
+matter-loving spirit, and if he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter.
+Every time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes it (as God makes
+mountains out of sunlight) a material thing. Every time he touches a
+material thing, in proportion as he touches it mightily he brings out
+inner light in it. He spiritualizes it. He abandons the glistening
+brass knocker--pleasing symbol to the outer sense--for a tiny knob on
+his porch door and a far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass knocker
+does not appeal to the spirit enough for the modern man, nor to the
+imagination. He wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bell
+with. He loves to wake the unseen. He will not even ring a door-bell
+if he can help it. He likes it better, by touching a button, to have a
+door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellar
+chewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs
+with a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He may be seen riding
+in three stories along his streets, but he takes his engines all off
+the tracks and crowds them into one engine and puts it out of sight.
+The more a thing is out of the sight of his eyes the more his soul
+sees it and glories in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden water
+spouts over his head and pours beneath his feet through his house.
+Hidden light creeps through the dark in it. The more might, the more
+subtlety. He hauls the whole human race around the crust of the earth
+with a vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids--sixty miles an
+hour--with invisible air. He photographs the tone of his voice on a
+platinum plate. His voice reaches across death with the platinum
+plate. He is heard of the unborn. If he speaks in either one of his
+worlds he takes two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut in with
+one. If he lives in either he wraps the other about him. He makes men
+walk on air. He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks open
+mountains with gas. The more perfect he makes his machines the more
+spiritual they are, the more their power hides itself. The more the
+machines of the man loom in human life the more they reach down into
+silence, and into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. The
+infinity which is the man's infinity is their infinity. The machines
+grasp all space for him. They lean out on ether. They are the man's
+machines. The man has made them and the man worships with them. From
+the first breath of flame, burning out the secret of the Dust to the
+last shadow of the dust--the breathless, soundless shadow of the dust,
+which he calls electricity--the man worships the invisible, the
+intangible. Electricity is his prophet. It sums him up. It sums up his
+modern world and the religion and the arts of his modern world. Out of
+all the machines that he has made the electric machine is the most
+modern because it is the most spiritual. The empty and futile look of
+a trolley wire does not trouble the modern man. It is his instinctive
+expression of himself. All the habits of electricity are his habits.
+Electricity has the modern man's temperament--the passion of being
+invisible and irresistible. The electric machine fills him with
+brotherhood and delight. It is the first of the machines that he can
+not help seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the man's highest
+self. His own soul beckons to him out of it.
+
+And the more electricity grows the more like the man it grows, the
+more spirit-like it is. The telegraph wire around the globe is melted
+into the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away from
+the dust. They envelop the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at
+last, unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light of
+stars,--fights its way to God.
+
+The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless ground or through the
+froth of heaven for the spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which
+makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makes
+earth out of air, he delves into the deepest sea as a cloud. He
+strides heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment at last of
+ELECTRICITY--the archangel of matter.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD
+
+
+Religion consists in being proud of the Creator. Poetry is largely the
+same feeling--a kind of personal joy one takes in the way the world is
+made and is being made every morning. The true lover of nature is
+touched with a kind of cosmic family pride every time he looks up from
+his work--sees the night and morning, still and splendid, hanging over
+him. Probably if there were another universe than this one, to go and
+visit in, or if there were an extra Creator we could go to--some of
+us--and boast about the one we have, it would afford infinite relief
+among many classes of people--especially poets.
+
+The most common sign that poetry, real poetry, exists in the modern
+human heart is the pride that people are taking in the world. The
+typical modern man, whatever may be said or not said of his religion,
+of his attitude toward the maker of the world, has regular and almost
+daily habits of being proud of the world.
+
+In the twentieth century the best way for a man to worship God is
+going to be to realize his own nature, to recognize what he is for,
+and be a god, too. We believe to-day that the best recognition of God
+consists in recognizing the fact that he is not a mere God who does
+divine things himself, but a God who can make others do them.
+
+Looked at from the point of view of a mere God who does divine things
+himself, an earthquake, for instance, may be called a rather feeble
+affair, a slight jar to a ball going ---- miles an hour--a Creator
+could do little less, if He gave a bare thought to it--but when I
+waked a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in my own house as
+if it were a hammock, and was told that some men down in Hazardville,
+Connecticut, had managed to shake the planet like that, with some
+gunpowder they had made, I felt a new respect for Messrs. ---- and Co.
+I was proud of man, my brother. Does he not shake loose the Force of
+Gravity--make the very hand of God to tremble? To his thoughts the
+very hills, with their hearts of stone, make soft responses--when he
+thinks them.
+
+The Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in '76, under its sky of iron and
+glass, is remembered by many people the day they saw it first as one
+of the great experiences of life. Like some vast, Titanic spirit, soul
+of a thousand, thousand wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mighty
+silence there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve-year-old boy, at
+least, the thought of the hour he spent with that engine first is a
+thought he sings and prays with to this day. His lips trembled before
+it. He sought to hide himself in its presence. Why had no one ever
+taught him anything before? As he looks back through his life there is
+one experience that stands out by itself in all those boyhood
+years--the choking in his throat--the strange grip upon him--upon his
+body and upon his soul--as of some awful unseen Hand reaching down
+Space to him, drawing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed child
+being held up before It--held up to an infinite fact, that he might
+look at it again and again.
+
+The first conception of what the life of man was like, of what it
+might be like, came to at least one immortal soul not from lips that
+he loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice behind a desk,
+but from a machine. To this day that Corliss engine is the engine of
+dreams, the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and to the soul. It
+rebuilds the universe. It is the opportunity of beauty throughout
+life, the symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of the unity of
+nations, and of the worship of God. In silence--like the soft far
+running of the sky--it wrought upon him there; like some heroic human
+spirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, through miles of aisles, and
+crowds of gazers, it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as the
+beat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering matter, of the clay
+conquering God.
+
+Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices surrounded me. It was the
+first hearing of the psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was like
+the spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it--nay, the
+vision that was builded in it--was the vision of the age to be: the
+vision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone of
+his sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of his
+soul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, and
+with the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship with
+Creation morning, and into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion)
+of the might and gentleness of God.
+
+There seem to be two ways to worship Him. One way is to gaze upon the
+great Machine that He has made, to watch it running softly above us
+all, moonlight and starlight, and winter and summer, rain and
+snowflakes, and growing things. Another way is to worship Him not only
+because He has made the vast and still machine of creation, in the
+beating of whose days and nights we live our lives, but because He has
+made a Machine that can make machines--because out of the dust of the
+earth He has made a Machine that shall take more of the dust of the
+earth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd it into steel and iron and
+say, "Go ye now, depths of the earth--heights of heaven--serve ye me.
+I, too, am God. Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the
+spirit that is in thee is my spirit. I also--even I also--am God!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A MODEST UNIVERSE
+
+
+I have heard it objected that a machine does not take hold of a man
+with its great ideas while he stands and watches it. It does not make
+him feel its great ideas. And therefore it is denied that it is
+poetic.
+
+The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts of machinery is not
+denied. What seems to be lacking in the machines from the artistic
+point of view at present is a mere knack of making the faces plain and
+literal-looking. Grasshoppers would be more appreciated by more people
+if they were made with microscopes on,--either the grasshoppers or the
+people.
+
+If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain and
+large enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by
+it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have
+been) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies
+towering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a
+grasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across
+valleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and
+villages--would have been one of the impressive features of human
+life. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a
+grasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was
+creative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of
+having such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping
+softly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and
+yet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread
+over several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not
+impressed by it.
+
+But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There
+is something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of
+machinery. "The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is
+not poetic." "A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as
+its form expresses its nature." Mechanical inventions may stand for
+impressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the
+facts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses
+those facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of
+battle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full of
+dynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not.
+
+That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not
+be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping
+toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it,
+if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and
+criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember
+the day when he all but lost his life because
+
+  A pill-box by the river's brim
+  A simple pill-box was to him
+  And nothing more.
+
+Wordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an
+issue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its
+language, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it
+looks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The
+language is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new
+language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a
+language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry
+in machinery.
+
+The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it
+does not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I,
+comrade nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor God's
+machine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the
+meaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we
+are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile,
+creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles
+away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its
+Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The
+ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of
+our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not
+HERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our
+veins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is
+born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the
+immeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to
+be--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to
+dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over
+the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the
+infinite, beckon and are still.
+
+I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express
+themselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know
+that when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looks
+out upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, with
+their huge machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out upon me.
+I rest.
+
+I know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of
+the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my
+soul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me I
+grow strong and glad.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE MACHINES AS POETS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS
+
+
+I have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the
+main lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near by
+and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about
+art. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we
+have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do
+now--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of things
+one wishes one had said, afterward.
+
+We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about
+other things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time,
+that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things
+That Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.
+
+Brim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than I
+have a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stop
+to it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this world
+that have been beautiful a long while, without having people--well,
+people like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all these
+modern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there is
+something one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough to
+go with the rest. I'm afraid Brim gets a little personal in talking
+with me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in a
+conversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem to
+lead logically to one's going away, and trying to find afterwards,
+some thing that is the matter with him.
+
+"The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is," I say (on paper, afterwards,
+as the train speeds away), "that you have a false-classic or
+Stucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked all
+these things--trolley cars, cables, locomotives,--seen the beautiful
+in them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the way
+we do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when one
+thinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeks
+liked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would
+like now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin to
+enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the
+chance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more
+out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I
+suspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William
+Watson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in
+Schenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anything
+else for the rest of their natural lives."
+
+I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the
+machines that a Greek would see, as yet.
+
+But I have seen enough.
+
+I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small
+enough, welding the nations together before my eyes.
+
+I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of
+visions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the
+world.
+
+I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men--the five thousand of
+them--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted
+railroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them
+there with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities,
+putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that
+Bliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them ...
+brother-artists every one ... in the glory ... in the dark ...
+Vulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skyscrapers,
+steam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and
+the earth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
+
+
+The poetry of machinery to-day is a mere matter of fact--a part of the
+daily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing the
+world wants to know about machinery is not that there is poetry in it,
+but that the poetry which the common people have already found there,
+has a right to be there. We have the fact. It is the theory to put
+with the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles us
+most. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solid
+comfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory to
+approve of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make very
+much difference.
+
+1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is an expression of the soul.
+
+2. It expresses the soul (1) of the individual man who creates the
+machine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine the
+engineer.
+
+3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God who can make men who can
+thus express their souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the least
+sense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like this
+is not clever enough with all his powers to find a God, and to worship
+a God, he can worship himself. It is because the poetry of machinery
+is the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead of
+immeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally taken
+for granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned more
+of the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machines
+that have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than from
+the poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousand
+men and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and has
+his bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed by
+Abraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--the
+argument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight the
+locomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whether
+it wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered by
+steamships. It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new one.
+Seers and poets have made poetry out of it for two thousand years.
+Machinery is making the poetry mean something. Every new invention in
+matter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with
+ideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it than
+was ever dreamed of in Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard to
+show that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the most
+literary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events of
+the nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought that
+any one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is more
+wonderful than anything that has ever been said on it.
+
+"This is all very true," interrupts the Logical Person, "about
+printing presses and looms and everything else--one could go on
+forever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loom
+has made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browning
+would have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loom
+has freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is a
+fit theme for poetry." "Besides"--breaks in the Minor Poet--"there is
+a difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its being
+beautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautiful
+the way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?"
+
+This brings to a point the whole question as to where the definition
+of beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing's
+being considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question
+"Is a thing beautiful?" resolves itself into "How large has a
+beautiful thing a right to be?" A man's theory of beauty depends, in a
+universe like this, upon how much of the universe he will let into it.
+If he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and
+passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if a
+beautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggests
+boundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It is
+something--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever it
+is or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life
+is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they
+see more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental
+idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetry
+were made--most of them--before infinity was discovered.
+
+Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind of
+huge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but the
+idea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us or
+with our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to do
+with IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience of
+infinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparatively
+speaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more modern
+discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modern
+machinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention for
+being infinite.
+
+The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing
+the same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time
+and space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this
+very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity
+shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the
+other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little
+difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is
+everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as
+much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The
+locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives
+her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches
+the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of
+infinity.
+
+This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional
+poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our
+traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established
+institution in human life, and infinity is not.
+
+No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world
+was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were
+afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over
+them. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people
+to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably
+employed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured
+policeman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.
+
+The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference
+was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky
+off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a
+kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and
+homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the
+sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough.
+Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it
+beautiful.
+
+Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another
+way--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to
+make it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new
+religion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the
+ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars,
+its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the
+past. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our
+human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests'
+wilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with
+little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.
+
+It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has
+seen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what
+is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out
+at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about
+philosophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main fact
+about us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands of
+years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding
+themselves.
+
+But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by
+a new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud
+of steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love,
+the new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of
+nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with
+falling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws
+down Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It
+is a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new
+widemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and
+waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.
+
+The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us--the mere
+hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God--is the
+neighborhood of human life.
+
+Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses
+the greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that
+the soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.
+
+Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of
+infinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is
+infinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is.
+The infinity of man is no longer a thing that the poet takes--that he
+makes an idea out of--Machinery makes it a matter of fact.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE
+
+
+The main thing the nineteenth century has done in literature has been
+the gradual sorting out of poets into two classes--those who like the
+infinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and those who have not. It
+seems reasonable to say that the poets who have habits of infinity, of
+space-conquering (like our vast machines), who seek the suggestive and
+immeasurable in the things they see about them--poets who like
+infinity, will be the poets to whom we will have to look to reveal to
+us the characteristic and real poetry of this modern world. The other
+poets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the modern world, to
+say nothing of singing in it. They do not feel at home in it. The
+classic-walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. It is too
+savagely large, too various and unspeakable and unfinished. He looks
+at the sky of it--the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, to which it
+sings and lifts itself--with a strange, cold, hidden dread down in his
+heart. To him it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness.
+Its literature--its art with its infinite life in it, is a blur of
+vagueness. He complains because mobs of images are allowed in it. It
+is full of huddled associations. When Carlyle appeared, the
+Stucco-Greek mind grudgingly admitted that he was 'effective.' A man
+who could use words as other men used things, who could put a pen down
+on paper in such a way as to lift men out from the boundaries of their
+lives and make them live in other lives and in other ages, who could
+lend them his own soul, had to have something said about him;
+something very good and so it was said, but he was not an "artist."
+From the same point of view and to the same people Browning was a mere
+great man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a man who went
+about living and loving things, with a few blind words opening the
+eyes of the blind. It had to be admitted that Robert Browning could
+make men who had never looked at their brothers' faces dwell for days
+in their souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, too, seer,
+lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of his violins conquering a new
+heaven for us, had great conceptions and was a musical genius without
+the slightest doubt, but he was not an "artist." He never worked his
+conceptions out. His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. They
+are nothing if they are not played again and again. For twenty or
+thirty years Richard Wagner was outlawed because his music was
+infinitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres). People seemed
+to want him to write cosy, homelike music.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART
+
+  "_So I drop downward from the wonderment
+  Of timelessness and space, in which were blent
+  The wind, the sunshine and the wanderings
+  Of all the planets--to the little things
+  That are my grass and flowers, and am content._"
+
+
+This prejudice against the infinite, or desire to avoid as much as
+possible all personal contact with it, betrays itself most commonly,
+perhaps, in people who have what might be called the domestic feeling,
+who consciously or unconsciously demand the domestic touch in a
+landscape before they are ready to call it beautiful. The typical
+American woman, unless she has unusual gifts or training, if she is
+left entirely to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery. Even if her
+imagination has been somewhat cultivated and deepened, so that she
+feels that a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in order to
+be beautiful, she still chooses nooks and ravines, as a rule, to be
+happy in--places roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in with
+beauty on every side. She is not without her due respect and
+admiration for a mountain, but she does not want it to be too large,
+or too near the stars, if she has to live with it day and night; and
+if the truth were told--even at its best she finds a mountain distant,
+impersonal, uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she does not see
+beauty in the wide plain. There is something in her being that makes
+her bashful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she can snuggle up
+to. It is essentially the bird's taste in scenery. "Give me a nest, O
+Lord, under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy glory." A bush or a
+tree with two or three other bushes or trees near by, and just enough
+sky to go with it--is it not enough?
+
+The average man is like the average woman in this regard except that
+he is less so. The fact seems to be that the average human being (like
+the average poet), at least for everyday purposes, does not want any
+more of the world around him than he can use, or than he can put
+somewhere. If there is so much more of the world than one can use, or
+than anyone else can use, what is the possible object of living where
+one cannot help being reminded of it?
+
+The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge against
+the infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pine
+trees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasant
+things about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look at
+them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they
+would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines
+singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the
+world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious
+mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or
+unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a
+single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole
+skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not want
+a whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes as
+near to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world like
+this, could expect. It is the one tree of all others that profoundly
+suggests, every time the light falls upon it or the wind stirs through
+it, THE THINGS THAT MAN CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlight
+and its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the monument of the
+woods, to The Intangible, and The Invisible, to the spirituality of
+matter. Who shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit of the
+pine? And who, who has ever looked upon the pines--who has seen them
+climbing the hills in crowds, drinking at the sun--has not felt that
+however we may take to them personally they are the Chosen People
+among the trees? To pass from the voice of them to the voice of the
+common leaves is to pass from the temple to the street. In the rest of
+the forest all the leaves seem to be full of one another's din--of
+rattle and chatter--heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voice
+of every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, and
+the whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice of
+the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-things
+that human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from the
+presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over our heads.
+
+Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the pine in the imagination
+is not that it is more beautiful in itself than other trees, but that
+the beauty of the pine seems more symbolic than other beauty, and
+symbolic of more and of greater things. It is full of the sturdiness
+and strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the tree to see the
+sky with, and its voice is the voice of the horizons, the voice of the
+marriage of the heavens and the earth; and not only is there more of
+the sky in it, and more of the kingdom of the air and of the place of
+Sleep, but there is more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart
+of the earth. No other tree can be mutilated like the pine by the hand
+of man and still keep a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty
+about it and about all the place where it stands. A whole row of them,
+with their left arms cut off for passing wires, standing severe and
+stately, their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help being
+beautiful. The beauty is symbolic and infinite. It cannot be taken
+away. If the entire street-side of a row of common, ordinary
+middle-class trees were cut away there would be nothing to do with the
+maimed and helpless things but to cut them down--remove their misery
+from all men's sight. To lop away the half of a pine is only to see
+how beautiful the other half is. The other half has the infinite in
+it. However little of a pine is left it suggests everything there is.
+It points to the universe and beckons to the Night and the Day. The
+infinite still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the prophet of trees.
+In the sad lands it but grows more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit
+of the tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite--of
+everywhere--wherever its shadow falls. I have heard the sound of a
+hammer in the street and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine
+woods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud catches the great empty
+spaces of night out of heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers
+all sound into itself--echoes it along the infinite.
+
+The pine may be said to be the symbol of the beauty in machinery,
+because it is beautiful the way an electric light is beautiful, or an
+electric-lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty that belong to
+life: finite beauty, in that its beauty can be seen in itself, and
+infinite beauty in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of the
+beauty that cannot be seen, the beauty that dwells around it.
+
+What is going to be called the typical power of the colossal art,
+myriad-nationed, undreamed of men before, now gathering in our modern
+life, is its symbolic power, its power of standing for more than
+itself.
+
+Every great invention of modern mechanical art and modern fine art has
+held within it an extraordinary power of playing upon associations, of
+playing upon the spirits and essences of things until the outer senses
+are all gathered up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were meant to
+be melted, into inner ones. What is wrought before the eyes of a man
+at last by a great modern picture is not the picture that fronts him
+on the wall, but a picture behind the picture, painted with the flame
+of the heart on the eternal part of him. It is the business of a great
+modern work of art to bring a man face to face with the greatness from
+which it came. Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite,--and a
+man and a woman. A picture with this feeling of the infinite painted
+in it--behind it--which produces this feeling of the infinite in other
+men by playing upon the infinite in their own lives, is a typical
+modern masterpiece.
+
+The days when the infinite is not in our own lives we do not see it.
+If the infinite is in our own lives, and we do not like it there, we
+do not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, or in a Corliss
+engine--a picture of the face of All-Man, mastering the
+earth--silent--lifted to heaven.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS
+
+
+It is not necessary, in order to connect a railway train with the
+infinite, to see it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a huge
+white hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite as infinite
+flying through granite in Hoosac Mountain. Most people who do not
+think there is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with flying
+through granite as a trait of the infinite in a locomotive, and yet
+these same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to where
+infinity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky somewhere)--if they
+could watch one night after night plowing through planets--would want
+a poem written about it at once.
+
+A man who has a theory he does not see poetry in a locomotive, does
+not see it because theoretically he does not connect it with infinite
+things: the things that poetry is usually about. The idea that the
+infinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run on
+a track (and be all the more infinite for not running off the track),
+does not occur to him. The first thing he does when he is told to look
+for the infinite in the world is to stop and think a moment, where he
+is, and then look for it somewhere else.
+
+It would seem to be the first idea of the infinite, in being infinite,
+not to be anywhere else. It could not be anywhere else if it tried;
+and if a locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in and out of the
+fiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry in
+it are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matter
+of seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing it in enough of its actual
+relations as it is, to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the
+order, the energy, and the restfulness of the whole universe are
+pulsing there through its wheels.
+
+The times when we do not feel poetry in a locomotive are the times
+when we are not matter-of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough of
+its actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makes
+anything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as
+the symbol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded symbol of
+everything else in the universe--the summing up of everything
+else--another whisper of God's.
+
+Have I not seen the great Sun Itself, from out of its huge heaven,
+packed in a seed and blown about on a wind? I have seen the leaves of
+the trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listened
+with my soul--thousands of years--I have heard The Night and The Day
+creeping softly through mountains. People called it geology.
+
+It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by going to the infinite, he
+is going to be infinite where he is. He is carving it on the hills,
+tunneling it through the rocks of the earth, piling it up on the crust
+of it, with winds and waters and flame and steel he is writing it on
+all things--that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The whole
+planet is his signature.
+
+If what the modern man is trying to say in his modern age is his own
+infinity, it naturally follows that the only way a modern artist can
+be a great artist in a modern age is to say in that age that man is
+infinite, better than any one else is saying it.
+
+The best way to express this infinity of man is to seek out the things
+in the life of the man which are the symbols of his infinity--which
+suggest his infinity the most--and then play on those symbols and let
+those symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program is
+something like this. The modern age means the infinity of man. Modern
+art means symbolism of man's infinity. The best symbol of the man's
+infinity the poet can find, in this world the man has made, is The
+Machine.
+
+At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down
+the long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud
+floating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long
+wavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a
+great Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it
+almost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud
+propelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen
+a broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train
+of cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its
+whistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire
+by night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither
+is the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning
+building pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the
+car-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid
+Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this
+ghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it,
+gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away
+into heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have
+seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or
+passing of the spirit of the age.
+
+When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting
+Number Eight to Springfield.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS
+
+
+If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats
+quietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then
+could watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before our
+eyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and their
+last wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to
+know why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their
+new things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.
+
+Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be
+arranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery
+seems to be to every man's personal everyday instinct and experience.
+We have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it.
+
+I do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But
+there is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one
+permission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable to
+enjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I felt
+I had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be
+skipped.
+
+1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.
+
+2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals
+the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.
+
+3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately
+expressed.
+
+4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideas
+expressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry and
+of the imagination and the soul--infinity and the two forms of
+infinity, the liberty and the unity of man.
+
+5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinery
+because machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurable
+ideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurable
+things, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is in
+the mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine is
+beautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world
+contains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unity
+of all men's lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is now
+being wrought out before our eyes upon the face of the earth.
+
+6. It is only from the point of view of a nightingale or a sonnet that
+the aesthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be
+criticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurable
+ideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;
+the more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, and
+upon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and
+satisfying they are.
+
+7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will be
+the man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. These
+ideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about the
+lives of all of us--might be stated roughly as follows:
+
+  The idea of the incarnation--the god in the body of the man.
+  The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from others.
+  The idea of unity--the soul's rescue from its mere self.
+  The idea of the Spirit--the Unseen and Intangible.
+  The idea of immortality.
+  The cosmic idea of God.
+  The practical idea of invoking great men.
+  The religious idea of love and comradeship.
+
+And nearly every other idea that makes of itself a song or a prayer in
+the human spirit.
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE IDEA OF INCARNATION
+
+  "_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,
+
+  And found it not--but many things beside;
+  Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.
+  And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.
+
+  Then wandering upward through the solid earth
+  With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,
+  I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,
+
+  And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie
+  Safe in the dust or ride along the sky--
+  Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'"
+
+
+The grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hop
+for his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watching
+him--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loom
+up on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one of
+the great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumps
+forty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as well
+as any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make
+two hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course,
+that the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolley
+to do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use things
+outside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everything
+outside him serve him as if he had it on his own body--uses a whole
+universe every day without the trouble of always having to carry it
+around with him. He gets his will out of the ground and even out of
+the air. He lays hold of the universe and makes arms and legs out of
+it. If he wants at any time, for any reason, more body than he was
+made with, he has his soul reach out over or around the planet a
+little farther and draw it in for him.
+
+The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not differ from the man in
+that he has a soul and body both, but his soul and body seem to be
+perfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably the
+best (and the worst) that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if he
+has one, that it is in his legs--that he really has his wits about
+him.
+
+Looked at superficially, or from the point of view of the next hop, it
+can hardly be denied that the body the human soul has been fitted out
+with is a rather inferior affair. From the point of view of any
+respectable or ordinarily well-equipped animal the human body--the one
+accorded to the average human being in the great show of
+creation--almost looks sometimes as if God really must have made it as
+a kind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on the
+rest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very moment
+he was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the
+animals man should be immortal--and had let it go at that. With the
+exception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra
+fold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the most
+unexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedingly
+unlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to
+any one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with our hands and
+feet, any animal on earth could tell us, are things we do not do as
+well as men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as well as we did
+when we were born. Our very babies are our superiors.
+
+The only defence we are able to make when we are arraigned before the
+bar of creation, seems to be, that while some of the powers we have
+exhibited have been very obviously lost, we have gained some very fine
+new invisible ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all,--our
+nerves, for instance,--the mentalized condition of our organs. And
+then, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter.
+When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the
+judgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking
+at us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion,
+we hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in
+us. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well
+our bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean
+is, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large,
+or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well
+arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a
+superior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to
+appreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can
+deny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale,
+little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on
+this earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we
+can. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before
+The Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all
+summer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost
+always under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it
+likes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in
+thousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we
+can well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughter
+at us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishes
+peeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still,
+underworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling,
+in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, it
+is true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on the
+planet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of staying
+carefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much by
+ourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise,
+called civilization, we keep each other in countenance after a
+fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when we
+stop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the others
+see us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to,
+and have it done with.
+
+It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up and
+down the world,--looking upon the man's body,--the little funny one
+that he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking upon
+the one that he really has. When one considers what a man actually
+does, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he
+has been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of
+central nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of
+infinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, of
+Nothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There
+is something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out and
+incomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say,
+but not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently,
+is a kind of light there is in it.
+
+But the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same light
+that reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames upon
+heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it,
+I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and
+worshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great waters
+and the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for a
+body, which the man has.
+
+I go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash of
+black and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death,
+disgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills,
+and the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn the
+papers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out through
+the dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and the
+Philippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices of
+the nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the
+man. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of the
+man meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watched
+them on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power,
+ninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, ... thundering aisles of
+souls ... on into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of the
+man.
+
+And when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently across
+heaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of the
+man is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, over
+it, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look,
+since I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon the countenance
+of the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or resting
+in the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reaches
+out around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars and
+beyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, that
+shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wireless
+telegraph and steel, or know the sound of its going? Now, when I see
+it, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. Like a low thunder it
+reaches around the crust of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle
+body (oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over the hill of the
+sea, soft and stately as the walking of the clouds in the upper air.
+
+Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always
+coming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the
+dark, "And I am here, too!"
+
+Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel
+Himself?
+
+And so it has come to pass, this vision I have seen with my own
+eyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body,
+going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and Space.
+Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a
+dream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his
+hand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the
+whole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist,
+the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of
+the ships.
+
+  Between the seas and skies
+  The Shuttle flies
+  Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep,
+  Thousand-sailed,
+  Half in waking, half in sleep.
+
+  Glistening calms and shouting gales
+  Water-gold and green,
+  And many a heavenly-minded blue
+  It thrusts and shudders through,
+  Past my starlight,
+  Past the glow of suns I know,
+  Weaving fates,
+  Loves and hates
+  In the Sea--
+  The stately Shuttle
+  To and fro,
+  Mast by mast,
+  Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.
+  Flights of Days and Nights
+  Flies fast.
+
+It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the
+modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and
+holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that
+machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging
+for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded
+into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a
+great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and
+the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities,
+making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and
+rolling out the roads of continents.
+
+If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet
+there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against
+us--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have
+almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man
+wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely
+hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for
+him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man
+and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He
+ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he
+lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him,
+"Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?"
+
+The trains like spirits flock to him.
+
+There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my
+pocket it sings.
+
+In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.
+
+I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale
+and small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to
+tell the truth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE IDEA OF SIZE
+
+
+Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount
+Tom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in
+machinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely
+being polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain,
+not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no
+place for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the
+trouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.
+Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening
+particularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and
+the hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and
+symbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity
+and Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets
+worse than other people's genealogies.
+
+But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just
+over the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations
+as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they
+will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It
+would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be
+agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious
+matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of
+course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the
+risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next
+few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a
+regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I
+do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must
+say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I
+would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very
+small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are
+more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering
+generality.
+
+I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at
+least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking
+down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever
+it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for
+me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very
+large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling,
+every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very
+conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I
+like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are not
+the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always
+at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a
+world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds
+I cannot see."
+
+The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on
+is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What I
+really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small
+or large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken
+iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of
+them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.
+I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the
+work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be
+done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the
+globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much
+of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it,
+every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing
+we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a
+young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred
+more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do
+up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or
+stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it
+does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or
+how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were
+all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so
+often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it
+out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was
+mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are
+thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be
+old-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very
+big earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spider
+that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be
+ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The
+universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a
+little compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a
+pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a
+single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever
+been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little
+wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for
+thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE IDEA OF LIBERTY
+
+
+Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was
+getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in
+and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day
+looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.
+I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a
+mile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see
+that I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings
+were hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not
+get myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look at
+it impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the
+universe, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the
+sunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe
+before. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt
+that history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.
+
+I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it
+and got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my
+friends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other
+uncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw
+it, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I
+discovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum
+for all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it was
+going to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not
+get myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun
+peeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flustered
+me--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I
+found myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what
+it would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to
+be. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably
+be too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.
+
+I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelee last summer. I
+resented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.
+
+The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a
+comparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only
+afforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It
+could not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was
+underneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. The
+feeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could
+not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken
+body and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been
+asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted
+to or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground
+underneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living
+every day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being
+asked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and
+found institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and
+ruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in space to burn itself
+up--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or
+bit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time
+and pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to
+the dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "You
+might as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelee in the
+face," I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, set
+down helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something
+all fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust
+or geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any
+place after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and
+all ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful
+ceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is
+seething beneath your feet."
+
+It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of
+this earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it,
+without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round
+swindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with
+all of us on it, laughing at us.
+
+I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelee broke out. I
+went wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to
+get warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all
+subjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It
+was a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had
+let through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground
+simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured
+the earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.
+I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming
+as the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the
+fires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss
+of outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and
+gradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both,
+both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would
+have to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race
+was going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little
+ones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just
+outside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all in
+a swirl of snowdrifts.
+
+I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I
+have always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human
+interest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if
+the earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract
+with the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off
+all of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a
+comparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far
+out at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual
+capacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was
+something distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if
+we had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this
+injured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I
+could not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out
+of the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing
+afar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.
+
+Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was
+standing as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or
+flowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I
+defied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to
+keep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me,
+of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if
+the soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness
+would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an
+inventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of
+the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be
+maltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had
+he not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet,
+flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homes
+out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of
+the mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.
+
+It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was
+when it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead
+of having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by
+apparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great
+nations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All
+the young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the ends
+or tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still
+at work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to
+have things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any
+afternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and
+playing duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.
+
+It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at
+any given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we
+like.
+
+I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just
+what the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would
+make some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if
+the sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged
+something, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely
+that the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries
+for nothing. The things they have done against him have been the
+making of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in
+the earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him
+and left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew
+what to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has
+had his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is
+only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think
+of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world
+with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can
+only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he
+makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like
+this are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath
+out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with
+poisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers,
+and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with
+a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in
+the great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night
+like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a
+breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he
+is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands
+of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without
+the copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought
+thousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need not
+fear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an
+action of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste
+of heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man
+like this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms
+him or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shall
+be as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire
+and wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and
+Nothing are his servants.
+
+The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics
+saying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off
+neglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision
+of all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in
+furs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep
+warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats
+on giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.
+It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:
+"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.
+Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At
+all events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet
+he's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful
+impossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking
+for."
+
+A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its
+street pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,
+which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which
+has its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is
+over the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights
+railway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping
+them, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a
+race like this could not find some way at least of managing its own
+planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming
+it, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed
+down in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the
+waves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden
+almost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at
+herself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things
+nowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock
+company or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that a
+thousand years from now we will not have found some other use for
+moonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be
+manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating
+houses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from
+door to door in cases and bottles.
+
+First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with
+a planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it,
+outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea
+that we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be
+more likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we
+ought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be
+much, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our
+continents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from
+the center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what
+science is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick
+out something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We
+manufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet
+as we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things,
+we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one
+wants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and
+mechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected
+enough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwest
+has just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the
+force of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or
+flag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over
+the edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of
+gravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a
+glance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or
+so (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.),
+everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure
+would gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When
+completed it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space
+(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and
+more). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a
+connection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one
+would care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that
+would always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up all
+the raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on the
+others. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station to
+the planets in general that would be useful. They would know what we
+want, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where we
+could.
+
+All this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult to
+tell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talking
+of a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is no
+telling about him--that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going
+son of God and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on,
+with quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes are
+prophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, Gentle
+Reader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground is
+still beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us notice
+stars more.
+
+In the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affair
+like this one single planet, need not worry us much.
+
+I still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeing
+it--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same
+old green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sun
+does. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and
+of love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man,
+running about and strutting, flying through space on it, all his
+interests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning to
+worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds or
+with this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand or
+deck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was.
+Long after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthest
+breath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises around
+you, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your round
+white cloud, rowing faithfully through space!
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY
+
+
+If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around
+to my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not
+at all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I
+should do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it was
+for. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want
+to settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being
+conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first
+thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it
+might be overdoing things a little.
+
+I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men
+and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I
+know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be
+lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in
+immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I
+were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting
+out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that
+wanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier
+and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how
+long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure
+in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and
+had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest
+preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is
+only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have
+the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality
+I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this
+very moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United
+States of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I
+feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to
+an infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or praying
+to Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging
+Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it
+sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to
+His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes,
+and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal
+throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his
+sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a
+petition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel
+as if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.
+
+I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was
+asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great
+blackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed
+out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of
+light--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through
+Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, "Now I will try to realize
+Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me...." Ties
+flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping
+ghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The
+long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops
+(and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential,
+semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence,
+they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up
+every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and
+further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.
+The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self,
+nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the
+long monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around
+and beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to
+pick out with one's soul from Darkness. "Here am I," I said as the
+roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed
+through the blackness. "Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of
+glimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my
+feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through
+deserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and
+hold me."
+
+No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea
+and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but
+it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of
+appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High
+Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my
+own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying
+that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or
+horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain
+may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must
+confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's
+immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in
+his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is
+his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and
+his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the
+space there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is
+living or staying, the universe is his real address.
+
+I have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide night
+and looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the
+swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my
+board in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered
+it in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of
+it--the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through me
+and chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, "Where art thou?" I
+looked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself and
+upon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters.
+
+  A thousand breaths we lie
+  Shrouded limbs and faces
+  Horizontal
+  Packed in cases
+  In our named and numbered places,
+  Catalogued for sleep,
+  Trembling through the Godlight
+  Below, above,
+  Deep to Deep.
+
+How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to
+have time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about
+another--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if
+it were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters out
+for having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--is
+a problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a
+grave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in
+another world would ever really pay some people for the time they have
+wasted in this one, worrying about it.
+
+Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as
+unimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I am
+a parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist of
+worlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am
+not living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe
+... with a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. The
+whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it.
+I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--to
+the uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit,
+would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night
+they reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with
+dreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at
+least as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I
+care little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across
+my soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other
+when I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related
+life, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or
+not,--takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of
+space or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and
+petering along over a long, narrow row of years?
+
+Thousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, and
+through the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked and
+printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not
+know that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam
+I say, "There is my omnipresence." My being is busy out in the
+universe having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the
+world are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to
+keep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I
+lay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether
+I so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof
+for me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.
+
+
+II
+
+I have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea of
+which seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who are
+worthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fashioned
+method that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practical
+purposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us,--are
+already being woven in us. The author does not say it in so many
+words, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual or
+subtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we live
+as we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one.
+
+I can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to take
+the time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infinite
+experiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about another
+world.
+
+It is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in an
+infinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managed
+than one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do,
+is to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this.
+If the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one,
+then so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems a
+little abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and why
+not leave it to God to work it out? He doesn't have to neglect
+anything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do it
+anyway.
+
+I have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of a
+theory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly
+still. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me,
+through all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deep
+grass. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city in
+the grass--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. I
+know their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. And
+when I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds,
+tides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possess
+them. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions of
+ages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sun
+and the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Who
+can shut me out from anybody's sunrise?
+
+  "Oh, tenderly the haughty day
+  Fills his blue urn with fire;
+  One morn is in the mighty heaven
+  And one in my desire."
+
+I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I can
+telegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is no
+longer a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, conducting a big
+foolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helpless
+cities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it out
+from over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is my
+sky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has a
+monopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I have
+made an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky.
+The soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares.
+Men go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift my
+hands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the hands
+of my hands I work with it. I say "I and the sky." I say "I and the
+Earth." We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached over
+with the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--a
+kind of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfully
+out in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one of
+his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborly
+thought. God's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man have
+signaled each other.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE IDEA OF GOD
+
+
+My study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where I
+put it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of
+it--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand
+guard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;
+nearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down
+in my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming
+gently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I would
+not believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in which Bottle?" I have groped
+for one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping
+for a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of
+ancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events
+of the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed
+on the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make
+out to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can.
+
+I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that
+when the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in
+my mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things,
+pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow
+and reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells me
+cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he
+has found Him, I wonder if he has.
+
+The very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a world
+alive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey
+to search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would find
+would be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his
+God in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.
+
+It does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain,
+rudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the very
+essence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for,
+in giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences.
+I suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with the
+scientist is not that he is material, but that he is not material
+enough,--he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot
+believe for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacle
+of matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed
+thing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--this
+spectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in a
+bottle for instance--a bottle which he places absolutely by itself,
+would be able to find one if he tried. It seems to me that it is by
+letting one's self have one's infinite--one's infinitely related
+experiences, and not by cutting them off that one comes to know a God.
+To find a God who is everywhere one must at least spend a part of
+one's time in being everywhere one's self--in relating one's knowledge
+to all knowledge.
+
+There are various undergirding arguments and reasons, but the only way
+that I really know there is an infinite God is because I am
+infinite--in a small way--myself. Even the matter that has come into
+the world connected with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. If
+my soul, like some dim pale light left burning within me, were merely
+to creep to the boundaries of its own body, it would know there was a
+God. The very flesh I live with every day is infinite flesh. From the
+furthest rumors of men and women, the furthest edge of time and space
+my soul has gathered dust to itself. I carry a temple about with me.
+If I could do no better, and if there were need, I am my own
+cathedral. I worship when I breathe. I bow down before the tick of my
+pulse. I chant to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of my
+fingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man ask
+me to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go
+out into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure there
+is a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the
+God within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of the
+burning dust warmed me before the stars--made a hearth for my soul
+before them? I am at home with them. I sit daily before worlds as at
+my own fireside.
+
+I suppose there is something intolerant and impatient and a little
+heartless about an optimist--especially the kind of optimism that is
+based upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the structure of the
+world. There is such a thing, I suppose, with some of us, as having a
+kind of devilish pride in faith, as one would say to ordinary mortals
+and creepers and considerers and arguers "Oh now just see me believe!"
+We are like boys taking turns jumping in the Great Vacant Lot, seeing
+which can believe the furthest. We need to be reminded that a man
+cannot simply bring a little brag to God, about His world, and make a
+religion out of it. I do not doubt in the least, as a matter of
+theory, that I have the wrong spirit--sometimes--toward the scientific
+man who lives around the corner of my mind. It seems to me he is
+always suggesting important-looking unimportant things. I have days of
+sympathizing with him, of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack
+up upon my shoulders and strapping it there. But before I know it I'm
+off. I throw it away or melt it down into a tablet or something--put
+it in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God.
+
+And the worst of it is, I think He intended me to. I think He intended
+me to know and to keep knowing daily what He has done for me and is
+doing now, out in the universe, and what He has made me to do. I also
+am a God. From the first time I saw the sun I have been one daily. I
+have performed daily all the homelier miracles and all the common
+functions of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into my being. Out
+of the air of heaven I have made flesh. I have taken earth from the
+earth and burned it within me and made it into prayers and into songs.
+I have said to my soul "To eat is to sing." I worship all over. I am
+my own sacrament. I lay before God nights of sleep, and the delight
+and wonder of the flesh I render back to Him again, daily, as an
+offering in His sight.
+
+And what is true of my literal body--of the joy of my hands and my
+feet, is still more true of the hands of my hands.
+
+When I wake in the night and send forth my thought upon the darkness,
+track out my own infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky
+reaching around me, all telegraphed through with thought, and floored
+with steel, I may have to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes),
+but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the door of heaven if
+there is a heaven or needs to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory
+of the other worlds, has not science itself told me that they are a
+part of me and I a part of them? Nothing is that would not be
+different without something else. My thoughts are ticking through the
+clouds, and the great sun itself is creeping through me daily down in
+my bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a hundred seas. I turn
+over in my sleep at midnight and lay my hand on the noon. And when I
+have slept and walk forth in the morning, the stars flow in my veins.
+Why should a man dare to whine? "Whine not at me!" I have said to man
+my brother. If you cannot sing to me do not interrupt me.
+
+  Let him sing to me
+  Who sees the watching of the stars above the day,
+  Who hears the singing of the sunrise
+  On its way
+  Through all the night.
+  Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms,
+  Whose soul has roamed
+  Infinite-homed
+  Through tents of Space,
+  His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms
+  All wonder.
+
+  Let him sing to me
+  Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover
+  Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds
+  The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife,
+  The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds,
+  Of His Own Life.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE
+
+
+_AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN_
+
+  Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,
+  Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words
+  In the music-haunted houses of the birds,
+  Singers with the thrushes and pewees
+  In the glimmer-lighted roofs
+  Of the trees--
+  Unhand my soul!
+  Buds with singing in their hearts,
+  Birds with blooms upon their wings,
+  All the wandering whispers of delight,
+  The near familiar things;
+  Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,
+  Sounds of going in the grain
+  Shall not bind me to thy singing
+  When the sky with God is ringing
+  For the Joy of the Rain.
+  Sea and star and hill and thunder,
+  Dawn and sunset, noon and night,
+  All the vast processional of the wonder
+  Where the worlds are,
+  Where my soul is,
+  Where the shining tracks are
+  For the spirit's flight--
+  Lift thine eyes to these
+  From the haunts of dewdrops,
+  Hollows of the flowers,
+  Caves of bees
+  That sing like thee,
+  Only in their bowers;
+  From the stately growing cities
+  Of the little blowing leaves,
+  To the infinite windless eaves
+  Of the stars;
+  From the dainty music of the ground,
+  The dim innumerable sound
+  Of the Mighty Sun
+  Creeping in the grass,
+  Softest stir of His feet
+  (Where they go
+  Far and slow
+  On their immemorial beat
+  Of buds and seeds
+  And all the gentle and holy needs
+  Of flowers),
+  To the old eternal round
+  Of the Going of His Might,
+  Above the confines of the dark,
+  Odors and winds and showers,
+  Day and night,
+  Above the dream of death and birth
+  Flickering East and West,
+  Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth--
+  Where He wheels
+  And soars
+  And plays
+  In illimitable light,
+  Sends the singing stars upon their ways
+  And on each and every world
+  When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep
+  Is furled--
+  Pours the Days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric
+cars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home to
+supper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The
+Thing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been
+found by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turned
+on--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels,
+and run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out in
+the darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I
+had seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked
+on in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more
+surprised if I had met a star walking in the street.
+
+  In my deepest dream
+  I heard the Song
+  Running in my sleep
+  Through the lowest caves of Being
+  Down below
+  Where no sound is, sun is,
+  Hearing, seeing
+  That men know.
+
+There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars
+moving, that made it all seem very old.
+
+
+_An Ode to the Lightning._
+
+  Before the first new dust of dream God took
+  For making man and hope and love and graves
+  Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods
+  Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow
+  Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,
+  The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague
+  To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept
+  From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff
+  That wove the worlds,
+  Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,
+  While still, hinged on nothing,
+  Dim and shapeless Things
+  And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings
+  Floated and waited.
+  Before the winds had breathed the breath of life
+  Or blown from wastes of Space
+  To Earth's creating place,
+  The souls of seeds
+  And ghosts of old dead stars,
+  The Lightning Spirit willed
+  Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.
+  --Primal fire of all desire
+  That leaps from men to men,
+  Brother of Suns
+  And all the Glorious Ones
+  That circle skies,
+  He flashed to these
+  The night that brought the birth,
+  The vision of the place
+  And raised his awful face
+  To all their glittering crowds,
+  And cried from where It lay
+  --A tiny ball of fire and clay
+  In swaddling clothes of clouds,
+  "Behold the Earth!"
+
+         *     *     *     *     *
+         *     *     *     *     *
+
+  Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer
+  Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!
+  Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.
+  Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven
+  And heaven and Heaven's heaven.  Oh thou whose play
+  Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_)
+  --And call from holidays of space, sojourns
+  Of suns and moons, and lock to earth
+  (_Why lock to earth?_)
+
+         *     *     *     *     *
+
+  That the Dead Face may flash across the seas
+  The cry of the new-born babe be heard around
+  A world. Ah me! and the click of lust
+  And the madness and the gladness and the ache
+  Of Dust, Dust!
+
+
+AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.
+
+THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE
+
+  The mortal wires of the heart of the earth
+  I sing, melted and fused by men,
+  That the immortal fires of their souls should fling
+  To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,
+  And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense
+  The flame of the Creature's ken,
+  The flame of the glow of the face of God
+  Upon the face of men.
+
+  Wind-singing wires
+  Along their thousand airy aisles,
+  Feet of birds and songs of leaves,
+  Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.
+  Sea-singing wires
+  Along their thousand slimy miles,
+  Shadowy deeps,
+  Unsunned steeps,
+  Beating in their awful caves
+  To mouthing fish and bones
+  And weeds unfurled
+  Deserts of waves
+  The heart-beat of this upper world.
+  Infinite blue, infinite green,
+  Infinite glory of the ear
+  Ticking its passions through
+  Infinite fear,
+  Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks
+  The forever untrodden decks
+  Of Death,
+  Ever the seething wires
+  On the floors
+  Of the world,
+  Below the last
+  Locked fast
+  Water-darkened doors
+  Of the sun,
+  Lighting the awful signal fires
+  Of our speechless vast desires
+  On the mountains and the hills
+  Of the sea
+  Till the sandy-buried heights
+  And the sullen sunken vales
+  And fire-defying barrens of the deep
+  The hearth of souls shall be
+  Beacons of Thought,
+  And from the lurk of the shark
+  To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark
+  And where the farthest cloud-sail fills
+  Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping
+  The might and mad delight,
+  The hell-and-heaven groping
+  Of our little human wills.
+
+
+AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS
+
+THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH
+WOULD NOT WORK
+
+  Roofed in with fears,
+  Beneath its little strip of sky
+  That is blown about
+  In and out
+  Across my wavering strip of years--
+  Who am I
+  Whose singing scarce doth reach
+  The cloud-climbed hills,
+  To take upon my lips the speech
+  Of those whose voices Heaven fills
+  With splendor?
+
+  And yet--
+  I cannot quite forget
+  That in the underdawn of dreams
+  I have felt the faint surmise
+  Shining through the starry deep of my sleep
+  That I with God went singing once
+  Up and down with suns and storms
+  Through the phantom-pillared forms
+  And stately-silent naves
+  And thunder-dreaming caves
+  Of Heaven.
+
+  Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh
+  Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,
+  Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
+  Hast thrust
+  Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
+  Where are the deeds that needs must be,
+  The dreams, the high delights,
+  That I once more may hear my voice
+  From cloudy door to door rejoice--
+  May stretch the boundaries of love
+  Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
+  To the faint-remembered glory of those years--
+  May lift my soul
+  And reach this Heaven of thine
+  With mine?
+  Where are the gleams?
+  Thou shalt tell me,
+  Shalt compel me.
+  The sometime glory shall return
+  I know.
+
+  The day shall be
+  When by wondering I shall learn
+  With vapor-fingers to discern
+  The music-hidden keys of skies--
+  Shall touch like thee
+  Until they answer me
+  The chords of the silent air
+  And strike the wild and slumber-music out
+  Dreaming there.
+  Above the hills of singing that I know
+  On the trackless, soundless path
+  That wonder hath
+  I shall go,
+  Beyond the street-cry of the poet,
+  The hurdy-gurdy singing
+  Of the throngs,
+  To the Throne of Silence,
+  Where the Doors
+  That guard the farthest faintest shores
+  Of Day
+  Swing their bars,
+  And shut the songs of heaven in
+  From all our dreaming-doing din,
+  Behind the stars.
+
+  There, at last,
+  The climbing and the singing passed,
+  And the cry,
+  My hushed and listening soul shall lie
+  At the feet of the place
+  Where the Singer sings
+  Who Hides His Face.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN
+
+  "_I had a vision under a green hedge
+  A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear
+  Archangels rolling over the high mountains
+  Old Satan's empty skull._"
+
+
+As it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earth
+has about been put into shape, now, to do things.
+
+The Earth has never been seen before looking so trim and
+convenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and looms
+and printing presses and railways have been supplied, wireless
+telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we
+have put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it
+looks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just
+being finished up, now, for a Great Author.
+
+It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a
+prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the
+modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world
+full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the
+wrong size.
+
+The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical
+way, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its
+poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it
+is quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its
+machines and things making preparations for bigger ones.
+
+I have thought the great authors in every age were made by the
+greatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice,
+have felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes
+been called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds,
+by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him
+in His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost any
+one who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that
+Jesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have
+missed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at
+least--ideas that nations would be born for.
+
+It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the
+great prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations
+and that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the
+whole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a
+whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like
+galleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no
+particular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail
+across an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth
+in him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.
+He discovered America because he felt crowded.
+
+One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of
+immortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic
+fact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness.
+When people have to be created and born on purpose, generation after
+generation of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of
+them sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he
+spoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in
+the habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several
+centuries who gets them.
+
+I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this
+earth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and
+look expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet
+somewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to
+him. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and
+to listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks
+in it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been
+allowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could
+be said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot
+believe that a world which for the first time in its history has at
+last the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not
+going to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to
+say to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full
+audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would
+seem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half
+in light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having
+a man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back,
+either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or
+thought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this
+present world has the verse of scripture about the next come
+true--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." It is not conceivable that
+there shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to
+the first full house the planet has afforded.
+
+I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the
+peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little
+corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to
+himself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of
+years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can
+great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into
+single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a
+world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.
+The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids
+are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great
+authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be
+helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to
+say, with the first full house this planet has afforded.
+
+Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but
+speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations
+sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven
+seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the
+stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play
+following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of
+soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want
+to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction
+apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude.
+Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The
+wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet
+applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One
+would like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one
+was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space.
+
+I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or
+had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write
+in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was
+that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around
+all of us now--I do like to mention it.
+
+When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time
+to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel
+steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why
+it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and
+watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the
+foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the
+drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the
+last secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I
+have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I
+know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep
+enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and
+the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands
+of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working
+softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the
+word that was given to me to say.
+
+Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful,
+clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the
+other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and
+actions great in the world?
+
+Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great
+gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are
+unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting
+together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first
+world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really
+getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished,
+lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One
+sees the sign on it
+
+            TO LET
+  TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP
+
+  "_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me
+  Of some transcendent music I have heard;
+  No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,
+  No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.
+  But a glad strain of some still symphony
+  That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._"
+
+
+Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle
+Reader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying
+there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as
+you stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in
+your being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people
+in it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls
+say it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in
+the street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls,
+that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O to
+know--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second,
+twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to
+be sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets
+and silent houses of it!"
+
+I go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nights
+of the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, in
+The Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And I
+have said to you though I did not know it: "Did you not call to me?
+Did you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you."
+
+I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my soul.
+I have gone about and looked upon the face of the earth. I have
+demanded of smoking villages sweeping past and of the mountains and of
+the plains and of the middle of the sea: "Where are those that belong
+to me? Will I ever travel near enough, far enough?" I have gone up and
+down the world--seen the countless men and women in it, standing on
+either side of their Abyss of Circumstance, beckoning and reaching
+out. I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, or old, casting
+their bread upon the waters, grasping at sunsets or afterglows,
+putting their souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem to be
+flickering their lives out like Marconi messages into a sort of
+infinite, swallowing human space.
+
+Always this same wild aimless sea of living. There does not seem to be
+a geography for love. My soul answered me: "Did you expect a world to
+be indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. Blossoms and cyclones and
+sunshine and you and I--all blundering along together." "Let every
+seed swell for itself," the Universe has said, in its first fine
+careless rapture. God is merely having a good time. Why should I go up
+and down a universe crying through it, "Where are those that belong to
+me?" I have looked at the stars swung out at me and they have not
+answered, and now when I look at the men, I have seemed to see them,
+every man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands before him,
+hinged on emptiness. "You are alone," the heart hath said. "Get up and
+be your own brother. The world is a great WHO CARES?"
+
+But when, in the middle of deep, helpless sleep, tossed on the wide
+waters, I wake in a ship, feel it trembling all through out there with
+my brother's care for me, I know that this is not true. "Around
+sunsets, out through the great dark," I find myself saying, "he has
+reached over and held me. Out here on this high hill of water, under
+this low, touching sky, I sleep."
+
+Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake silently, and feel gathered
+around. I wonder if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the button
+by my pillow. I listen to great cities tending me. I have found all
+the earth paved, or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with my
+brother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide from love. He has hired
+oceans to do my errands. He has made the whole human race my
+house-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer joy, thinking of the
+strange peoples where the morning is, running to and fro for me, down
+under the dark. Next me, the great quiet throb of the engine--between
+me and infinite space--beating comfortably. I cannot help answering to
+it--this soft and mighty reaching out where I lie.
+
+My thoughts follow along the great twin shafts my brother holds me
+with. I wonder about them. I wish to do and share with them.
+
+  Were I a spirit I would go
+  Where the murmuring axles of the screws
+  Along their whirling aisles
+  Break through the hold,
+  Where they lift the awful shining thews
+  Of Thought,
+  Of Trade,
+  And strike the Sea
+  Till the scar of London lies
+  Miles and miles upon its breast
+  Out in the West.
+
+As I lie and look out of my port-hole and watch the starlight stepping
+along the sea I let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship I am
+in--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through my
+port-hole I seem to see other ships, ghosts of great cities--an ocean
+of them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, with
+their low hoarse whistles meeting one another, whispering to one
+another under the stars.
+
+"And they are all mine," I say, "hastening gently."
+
+I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole being float out upon the
+thought of it. The bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived a
+great life. It is as if I had been allowed to be a great man a minute.
+I feel rested down through to before I was born. The very stars, after
+it, seem rested over my head. I have gathered my universe about me. It
+is as if I had lain all still in my soul and some beautiful eternal
+sleep--a minute of it--had come to me and visited me. All men are my
+brothers. Is not the world filled with hastening to me? What is there
+my brother has not done for me? From the uttermost parts of the
+morning, all things that are flow fresh and beautiful upon my flesh.
+He has laid my will on the heavens. His machines are like the tides
+that do not stop. They are a part of the vast antennae of the earth.
+They have grown themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and dust, they
+are a part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek furs
+Alaska is as near as the next snowdrift. My brother has caused it to
+be so. Everywhere is five cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon
+from Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knife
+from India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas.
+Thousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my mouth, five or
+six continents have made for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip
+of my tongue.
+
+And this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me,
+solitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to take
+it in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one say
+this thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done for
+comradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it or
+desired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? This
+paper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him for
+it? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of a
+great roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand he
+has held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--of
+clouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea.
+
+And now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smoke
+forever.
+
+I have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some
+vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this
+whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in
+silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in
+my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.
+
+When I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunny
+silence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go by
+putting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer as
+it was at first, a mere train by itself to me,--a flash of parlor cars
+between a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings up
+between my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, it
+is the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creeping
+through the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring through
+the sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world.
+
+In the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it would
+be hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share in
+spirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseen
+peoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen,
+and poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets and
+the domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always the
+engineers,--I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world in
+their hands, who sweep up life ... long, narrow, little towns of
+souls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights.
+
+In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would rather
+be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I
+hear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, the
+great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the
+thunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there on
+the roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, past
+glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him
+(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on the
+switch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth and
+sky.... The cities swoon before him ... swoon past him. Thundering
+past his own thunder, echoes dying away ... and now out in the great
+plain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, little
+black miles.... Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder,
+thinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughs
+bitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men with
+tickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) he
+is not infallible. Once ... twice ... he might have ... he almost....
+Then suddenly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his teeth, he reaches
+out with his soul ... masters it, he strains himself up to his
+infallibility again ... all those people there ... fathers, mothers,
+children, ... sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as the
+minister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on a
+Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God
+... alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads.
+
+But I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can see
+at a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)
+which make the big companions. It is a mere matter of getting
+acquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woven
+through with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors.
+
+I have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spirits
+of the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer with
+us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked in
+cemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them with
+mighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence,
+walk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in show
+windows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into
+them. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little
+last whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre of
+soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the
+trees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a
+machine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not
+full of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea,
+after a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives were
+like. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about each
+other.
+
+There are days when it has been given to me to see the machines as
+inventors and prophets see them.
+
+On these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. I
+have seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the future
+through their fingers.
+
+On these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoples
+singing in the streets.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I have
+come to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily
+joy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking around
+one, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all this
+vast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and sounds
+and symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere,
+playing upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well,
+when in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in order
+around about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived.
+
+This great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before,
+always sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive
+energy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see the
+look of the future in its face.
+
+And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live
+forever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant
+gesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now,
+solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh,
+unknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn
+curtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence
+and darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding,
+forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And
+then with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and
+wonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside
+living his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep.
+
+
+
+
+BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient
+rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies
+and songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century.
+"If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill."
+
+II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven
+to his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are
+getting their living out of machines, or putting their living into
+them, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down
+under the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves
+him standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except
+by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of
+communing with his kind.
+
+III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul
+or the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little
+while--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A
+little while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to
+feel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems
+at first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in
+machines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the
+machine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame
+that minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a
+machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be
+anything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas.
+All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take
+the stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be
+connected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued
+existence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for
+modern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the
+crowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,
+and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.
+
+IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary men
+who know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them,
+the inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about the
+poetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of
+interpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead of
+being a literary or aesthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting
+people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.
+
+VI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of the
+people, the tools of the nations.
+
+The people are already coming to look upon the inventor under our
+modern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we call
+literature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing their
+living with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as men
+are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems the
+world listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpret
+machines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership until
+it does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in an
+age, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in a
+machine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, is
+not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of the
+machines that we have made could make a better religion than this.
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
+
+I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must
+have great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that the
+language of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideas
+that are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all language
+looked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, is
+irrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of
+an archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people who
+have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a form
+of human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings.
+
+II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of
+everything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show
+off. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not
+feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it,
+is not seeing it. The poetry is under water.
+
+III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for
+poetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for
+old-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch
+windmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern
+man. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its
+language is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in
+proportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modern
+language, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machines
+the more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric.
+Electricity is the modern man's prophet. It sums up his world. It has
+the modern man's temperament--the passion of being invisible and
+irresistible.
+
+IV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of God.
+Most men to-day are worshipping God--at least in secret, not merely
+because of this great Machine that He has made, running softly above
+us--moonlight and starlight ... but because He has made a Machine that
+can make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of the
+earth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron and
+say "Go ye now,--depths of the earth, heights of heaven--serve ye me!
+Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the spirit that is in
+thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!"
+
+V. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thing
+means, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning the
+language. The language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely
+know whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I only
+know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of
+the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my
+soul to it, and in some way--I know not how, while it sings to me, I
+grow strong and glad.
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE MACHINES AS POETS
+
+I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul of
+man--of a whole world of men.
+
+It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of the
+individual man who creates the Machine--the inventor, and the man who
+lives with the machine--the engineer.
+
+It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of God
+who can make men who can make machines.
+
+III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man's
+soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have--the
+man's sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not
+merely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it is
+making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear the
+machines, I hear Man saying, "God and I."
+
+V. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the infinity of
+man it expresses the two great immeasurable ideas of poetry and of the
+imagination and of the soul in all ages--the two forms of
+infinity--the liberty and the unity of man.
+
+The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.
+
+A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the
+nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.
+
+Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately
+expressed.
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
+
+The ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched in
+chapters as follows:
+
+I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man.
+
+III. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment.
+
+IV. The idea of immortality.
+
+V. The idea of God.
+
+VI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible.
+
+VII. The practical idea of invoking great men.
+
+VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Note.--The present volume is the first of a series which had their
+beginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago,
+answering or trying to answer the question, "Can a machine age have a
+soul?" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as it
+stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phases
+and implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in our
+modern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, are
+being considered in a series of three volumes called:
+
+I. The Voice of the Machines.
+
+II. Machines and Millionaires.
+
+III. Machines and Crowds.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. _$1.00._ "I have read it twice and
+enjoyed it the second time even more than the first."--_Oliver Wendell
+Holmes._
+
+"I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made me
+as hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of
+laughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I
+do not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as I
+would a note--right across the face and present it for payment in any
+man's library."--_Robert J. Burdette._
+
+
+THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. _$.75._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) "I must
+express with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm I have
+felt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most
+brilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were
+laid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form,
+and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely
+a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive....
+
+"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It
+is the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes
+me believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in
+authorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can
+conceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the
+date of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long
+been scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY, in _Boston
+Transcript_.
+
+
+THE LOST ART OF READING. _$1.00._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) "It is a
+real pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books of
+the day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us having
+read it will keep it near us."--_Life_.
+
+"Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what some
+people are a little alarmed even to think."--_Springfield Republican_.
+
+"You get right in between the covers and live."--_Denver Post_.
+
+
+THE SHADOW CHRIST. _$1.25._ (_The Century Co._) "Let me be one of the
+first to recognize in this book what every man who reads it
+thoughtfully will feel. Heaps of the books that have been written
+about the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust. They
+are the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a man appears
+who makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if
+necessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be a full,
+precise treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision.
+Theology expressed in a lyric. Criticism condensed into an
+epigram."--DR. HENRY VAN DYKE, in _The Book Buyer_.
+
+"The author's name--Gerald Stanley Lee--has been hitherto unknown to
+us in England, but the book he has here offered to the world indicates
+that he has that in him which will soon make it familiar."--_The
+Christian World_ (London).
+
+
+MOUNT TOM. AN ALL OUTDOORS MAGAZINE, devoted to rest and worship, and
+to a little look-off on the world.
+
+Edited by Mr. LEE. Every other month. 12 copies, $1.00.
+
+
+THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. _$1.25._ (_Mt. Tom Press._)
+
+
+  Any of the above mailed postpaid ordered direct from
+       The Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Mass.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by Gerald Stanley Lee
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