{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_20361/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_20361","id":"gutenberg_20361","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20361","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Engineering & Technology","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Machinery"],"text":"Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Lee Spector and\nthe Online Distributed Proofreading Team at\nhttp://www.pgdp.net\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Voice of the Machines\n\nAn Introduction to the Twentieth Century\n\n\nBY\n\n\nGerald Stanley Lee\n\n\nThe Mount Tom Press\nNorthampton, Massachusetts\n\n\n\n\nCOPYRIGHT, 1906\nBY\nTHE MOUNT TOM PRESS\n\n\n\n\nTO JENNETTE LEE\n\n  ... \"Now and then my fancy caught\n  A flying glimpse of a good life beyond--\n  Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing,\n  Troy falling, and the ages coming back,\n  And ages coming forward.\"...\n\n\n\n\nContents\n\n\nPART I\n\nTHE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES\n\n     I.--Machines as Seen from a Meadow\n    II.--As Seen through a Hatchway\n   III.--The Souls of Machines\n    IV.--Poets\n     V.--Gentlemen\n    VI.--Prophets\n\n\nPART II\n\nTHE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES\n\n     I.--As Good as Ours\n    II.--On Being Busy and Still\n   III.--On Not Showing Off\n    IV.--On Making People Proud of the World\n     V.--A Modest Universe\n\n\nPART III\n\nTHE MACHINES AS POETS\n\n     I.--Plato and the General Electric Works\n    II.--Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth\n   III.--The Grudge against the Infinite\n    IV.--Symbolism in Modern Art\n     V.--The Machines as Artists\n    VI.--The Machines as Philosophers\n\n\nPART IV\n\nTHE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES\n\n     I.--The Idea of Incarnation\n    II.--The Idea of Size\n   III.--The Idea of Liberty\n    IV.--The Idea of Immortality\n     V.--The Idea of God\n    VI.--The Idea of the Unseen and the Intangible\n   VII.--The Idea of Great Men\n  VIII.--The Idea of Love and Comradeship\n\n\n\n\nPART ONE\n\nTHE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES\n\n\n\n\nI\n\nMACHINES. AS SEEN FROM A MEADOW\n\n\nIt would be difficult to find anything in the encyclopedia that would\njustify the claim that we are about to make, or anything in the\ndictionary. Even a poem--which is supposed to prove anything with a\nlittle of nothing--could hardly be found to prove it; but in this\nbeginning hour of the twentieth century there are not a few of us--for\nthe time at least allowed to exist upon the earth--who are obliged to\nsay (with Luther), \"Though every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, we\ncannot say otherwise--the locomotive is beautiful.\"\n\nAs seen when one is looking at it as it is, and is not merely using\nit.\n\nAs seen from a meadow.\n\nWe had never thought to fall so low as this, or that the time would\ncome when we would feel moved--all but compelled, in fact--to betray\nto a cold and discriminating world our poor, pitiful, one-adjective\nstate.\n\nWe do not know why a locomotive is beautiful. We are perfectly aware\nthat it ought not to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for being\nbeautiful--and of ourselves. We have attempted all possible words upon\nit--the most complimentary and worthy ones we know--words with the\nfiner resonance in them, and the air of discrimination the soul loves.\nWe cannot but say that several of these words from time to time have\nseemed almost satisfactory to our ears. They seem satisfactory also\nfor general use in talking with people, and for introducing\nlocomotives in conversation; but the next time we see a locomotive\ncoming down the track, there is no help for us. We quail before the\nheadlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as the voice of the\nhurrying people. Our little row of adjectives is vanished. All\nadjectives are vanished. They are as one.\n\nUnless the word \"beautiful\" is big enough to make room for a glorious,\nimperious, world-possessing, world-commanding beauty like this, we are\nno longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behind\ntruth. Let it be shut in with its rim of hills--the word\nbeautiful--its show of sunsets and its bouquets and its doilies and\nits songs of birds. We are seekers for a new word. It is the first\nhour of the twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so is the\nlocomotive that conquers a hill. So is the telephone, piercing a\nthousand sunsets north to south, with the sound of a voice. The night\nis not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over the city, than the\nelectric spark pushing the night one side, that the city may behold\nitself; and the hour is at hand--is even now upon us--when not the sun\nitself shall be more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping the\nsun in the midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while the\nwill of a child to another child ticks round the earth. \"Time shall be\nfolded up as a scroll,\" saith the voice of Man, my Brother. \"The\nspaces between the hills, to ME,\" saith the Voice, \"shall be as though\nthey were not.\"\n\nThe voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.\n\nIt is the voice of the machines.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nAS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY\n\n\nIn its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its\nconditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented\nfact. The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a\ntraditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life\nto-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out.\nLeaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the\npeople of the world have had to be left out with it.\n\nNot to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see\npoetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.\n\nThe first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his\nmother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards,\nhe thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by\na machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were\nbuilt in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food has\ncome through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him\nby engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the\nclothes he wears was flashed together by looms.\n\nThe machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion\nand looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds\nthat that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a\nmachine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels\nor of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great\nwhirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the\nsystem--that is, the Machine--be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or\nspindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the\nbeginning of the world.\n\nThe moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a\nhuge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main\nfact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very\nwell, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may\nbe, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He\nlearns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe,\nturning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a\nlife, will hardly be inclined to stop--to wait perchance--to ask him\nwhat he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He\nlooks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of\nCircumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to\nthe machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past\nhim night and day,--miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked\ninto the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it\nin their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes\naround him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full\nof laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.\n\nHe listens to the Machine's prophet. \"All men,\" says Political\nEconomy, \"may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the\nother of three great classes of activity--production, consumption or\ndistribution.\"\n\nThe number of persons who are engaged in production outside of\nassociation with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one\nplace, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of\nhuman beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities.\n\nThe number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of\nassociation with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few\npeddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.\n\nThe number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of\nassociation with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as\nconsumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could be\nstopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be\nloaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the\ncoal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed by\nanother set of machines.\n\nSo omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs\nand wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found\non the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to\nlive this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him\nwhere he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his\nlife, to see the sky--to be sure there was a sky. It is then his\nprivilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running\nbelts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what this\nheaven is, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walled\nin forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels.\n\n\"No inspiring emotions,\" says the literary definition, \"ideas or\nconceptions can possibly be connected with machinery--or ever will\nbe.\"\n\nWhat is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of\nits natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the\nroof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the\nway of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that\nwe, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally\nsafe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take\ncomfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around\nus. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our\ngates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows\nherds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the\nmorning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have\ndone what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have\nlaid the boundary line of beauty?... The huge, hurrying, helpless\nworld in its belts and spindles--the people who are going to be\nobliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little\nmore--all this--the great strenuous problem--the defense of beauty,\nthe saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of it\nwith life-all these?... Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the\nnoises of the street. A little longer ... the low singing to\nourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our graves\nshall be as the passing of silence.\n\nIs it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society of\nhis kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he\nwants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not\nknow. I only know how it is now.\n\n  They stay not in their hold\n  These stokers,\n  Stooping to hell\n  To feed a ship.\n  Below the ocean floors,\n  Before their awful doors\n  Bathed in flame,\n  I hear their human lives\n  Drip--drip.\n\n  Through the lolling aisles of comrades\n  In and out of sleep,\n  Troops of faces\n  To and fro of happy feet,\n  They haunt my eyes.\n  Their murky faces beckon me\n  From the spaces of the coolness of the sea\n  Their fitful bodies away against the skies.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nSOULS OF MACHINES\n\n\nIt does not make very much difference to the machines whether there is\npoetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.\n\nIt is not an abstract question to the people who are under the\nmachines. Men who are under things want to know what the things are\nfor, and they want to know what they are under them for. It is a very\nlive, concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetry\nin machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it.\n\nThere seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this world\nor the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is\nnot bound up, in our modern age, with machinery. With the fate of\nmachinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the\ncharacteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age is\norganization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little\nto be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the\nprinciple of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired\nprinciple--if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be\nexpressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it--there is\nlittle to be hoped for in modern education.\n\nModern government is a machine. The more modern a government is, the\nmore the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It is\nmade up of (1) corporations--huge machines employing machines, and (2)\nof trusts--huge machines that control machines that employ machines.\nModern charity is a machine for getting people to help each other.\nModern society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other.\nModern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modern journalism\nis a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine for\nsupplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machines\ncannot supply.\n\nBoth in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable\nthing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better\nor worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes\nlittle difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It\nhas come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for.\nWe cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We\nare born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We\nbreathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more\nthan he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes,\neven by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in\nmachinery--that is if there is no beautiful and glorious\ninterpretation of machinery for our modern life--there cannot be\npoetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of\nthe future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be.\nIf we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something,\nwe ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above\nour lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are\nempty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of\ndarkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our\nwhole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a\nMachine Age have a soul?\n\nIf we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea\nin its simplest form, for machinery itself--that is, the machines of\nsteel and flame that minister to us--it will be possible to find a\ngreat hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we\nhave already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other\nmachines--our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered--the\nbetter. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that\ninspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with\nmachinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern\nreligion--(in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern\neducation--the man-machine; for modern government--the crowd-machine;\nfor modern art--the machine in which the crowd lives.\n\nIf inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because\nit is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modern\nworld to connect inspiring ideas with.\n\nJohnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and\nshadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and\nlooks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a\nmist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps\npast. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it\nis as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in\nthe wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled\nwith childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to\nwonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown\nto me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world\nlifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over\non a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania--for its days and nights.\nI am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen\nmen lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on\na star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the\nmaking and the welding place of the bones of the world.\n\nIt is the object of this present writing to search out a world--a\nworld a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know\nit and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be\nwritten across the world once more--written across this year of the\nworld in the roar of its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannot\nquite see the word YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we\nhear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the\nmachines themselves.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nPOETS\n\n\nWhen, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modern\nlife, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the\nthing we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideas\npractical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that \"it will always\nbe practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal\nto the imagination,\" we refer the question to the real world, to the\nreal spirit we know exists in the real world.\n\nExpectancy is the creed of the twentieth century.\n\nExpectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are\nnow gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the\nearth.\n\nThe man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of\nJohn Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something of\nthe age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer\nof verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this\nsame age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of\npoetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be\nlifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead,\nthis same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more\nkinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the\ndaring of their dreams.\n\nPessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being in\nthe real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of not\nbeing in enough of the real world.\n\nIf we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy\nexpectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall\nwe look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument?\nthe minor poet?\n\nThe poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the\ndoctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first\nby peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the\ndoor of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and\nhumbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth\nplaying upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of the\nmere outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of the\nthing called life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. He\nshall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over by\nmachines--shadowed by weariness--to the men about him half comrade,\nhalf monk--going in and out among them silently, with some secret\nglory in his heart.\n\nIf literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, who\nare putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers and\nbrakemen--as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club,\nthere would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--_i. e._, a\ngreat hope or great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that stands\nin the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor aesthetic. It is\nsociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a\ngentleman and a poet.\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nGENTLEMEN\n\n\nThe truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his\nwork. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves\nhis work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a\ngentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own employer.\nNo matter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail\nto pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is master\nof the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man who\nloves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make a\nman free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the\nranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what\na gentleman's work is worth.\n\nThe poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it,\nthe men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that\nthese men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of\nthem, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They\ncannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the\nautobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for him,\npossessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.\n\nLooking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number\nemployed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than\nthere are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative\nin creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else\nthere are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the fine\narts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shops\ncan hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather be\npreachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the much\nlarger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemen\nin the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they would\ndo the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing,\nand make every one else respect it.\n\nWhile the definition of a poet and a gentleman--that he is a man who\nloves his work--might appear to make a new division of society, it is\na division that already exists in the actual life of the world, and\nconstitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had.\n\nIt may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter how\nprosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon this\nplanet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the\nmost hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing\nin his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in\nspite of himself, and whether he knows it or not.\n\nSo long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to\nhim, so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal,\nthe heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty and the\nunconquerableness of that man, and of that man's delight, shall be\nupon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all\non earth who overhear heaven.\n\nEvery man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal\nconnected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet.\nIt makes little difference what he says about it. In proportion as he\nhas power with a thing; in proportion as he makes the thing--be it a\nbit of color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, or\na throttle--in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or express\nwhat he wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and\nearth cannot make him otherwise.\n\nThat the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward the\nmachine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the\napparent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in\nall essential respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has ever\nknown an inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feeling\ntoward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know that\nmen are living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (their\nfaces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but\ndying now, this very moment, to make a machine live,--martyrs of\nvalves and wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, tireless,\nunconquerable men?\n\nTo know an inventor the moment of his triumph,--the moment when,\nworking his will before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent,\nmassive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls\nand the needs of their bodies,--to know an inventor at all is to know\nthat at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep,\nsoft as from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that\nDante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and\nwatching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and\njoy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make,\nfrom the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is,\nafter all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and\ncog and wheel--is it not more than these to him standing before it\nthere? It is the face of matter--who does not know it?--answering the\nface of the man, whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.\n\nWhat is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the\nmen who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer and\nthe mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Their\ndays are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same\nunwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They\nbegin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and\nwheels, or of great waters.\n\nAs I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was\nholding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag,\nand his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him,\nheadlight, clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every\nbrakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the\nswitch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and\ngave the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched\nthem, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid\ncloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to\nthe Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the\nfalling of smoke.\n\nMichael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot\nthat was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a\nbrakeman himself.\n\nBrakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but\nthey love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to\nbrakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that\ntheir ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds\nof lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the\noutside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening\nlights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their\nendless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It is\nwrought into the very fibre of their being.\n\nYears pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the\nbrakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see\nthem--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and\nrocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.\n\nThey are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of\ntheir calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.\n\nMost of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the\nuniverse, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and\nstand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives\nthe secret that throbs through it all.\n\nFor a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an\nideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a\nlife in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this\nalso is to have lived.\n\nThe fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad\nman that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest\npertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of\nthe present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much a\nsymbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of\nthe art of an heroic age.\n\nThat it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships,\nto turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years\nold. We find it accounted for not only in the observation and\nexperience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do\nit at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets have\nadmitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before\nmountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When the\nsailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on the\ndecks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minor\npoets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and\nobliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close\nto the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If\nhe must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he\nselects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at\nnight singing to his bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.\nThere is not a passenger on the Empire State Express, this moment,\nbeing whirled to the West, who could not write a sonnet on it,--not a\nman of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through space\nbehind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and\nwrite a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street\ncould write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was\ndead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time to\nbring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still\nalive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it is\ngoing to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns\nof engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe\nwhere poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world,\nand bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor\nand unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man\nwho would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than\nto have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from\nthe old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger\nwhere she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. He\nspends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in and\nout, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, and\ntalking with them. Nothing can take him away.\n\nDoes any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection\nfor his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her\nbreath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle of\nthat ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who\nshall seek to define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory,\nin darkness or in day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of\nlife. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in his\nengine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to place\nhis hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that\nthis awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare to\ntouch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour\nmuscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this,\nclimbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It is\nimpossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touch\nsends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind can\ngo, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the\nwest--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because\nhe means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a\npoet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,\nhastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I\nalways see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through\nthe Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.\n\nWho am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to\nspeak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that\nI should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling\ntrack--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the\nman in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he\nwears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and\nthe cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words\nenough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life.\nStanding in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrill\nto his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of\nthe splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of his\nlife. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as the\nsinging a man would sing who felt his hand on the throttle of things.\nThe engine is a soul to me--soul of the quiet face thundering\npast--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling it\nto the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it to\nthe trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, that\nthe might of the spirit of man has passed that way.\n\nIf an engine is to be looked at from the point of view of the man who\nmakes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a\nright to be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression of\nthe human spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the human\nspirit, there shall be no escape for the children of this present\nworld, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in it\nthat shall hem life in, and bound it round on every side. The idealism\nand passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling he\nhas about his machine, the power with which that machine expresses\nthat feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations of this\nmodern age, a fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulate\nand far and faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now from\nabove, and now from below, and on every side of life. It is as though\nthe very ground itself should speak,--speak to our poor, pitiful,\nunspiritual, matter-despising souls,--should command them to come\nforth, to live, to gaze into the heart of matter for the heart of God.\nIt is so that the very dullest of us, standing among our machines, can\nhardly otherwise than guess the coming of some vast surprise,--the\ncoming of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, our sons and\ndaughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and our\nold men shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I do not dare to say\nit. What it means to our religion and to our life and to our art, this\ngreat athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I only know that so\nlong as the fine arts, in an age like this, look down on the\nmechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so long\nas the church worships the laborer's God, but does not reverence\nlabor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and none for\nwomen and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as there is no\npoet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this man, my\nbrother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the engine\nshall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it shall\nbe buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we have\nmore preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into life\ninsurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave their\nengines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than in\npulpits,--the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons\nsay. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we\nshall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we\nfain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand\nchoirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a\nfragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in\nthe delight of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made\na vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every\nword have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long\nas men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in\nsermons, I listen to engines.\n\nWould to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So\nit cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,\nblundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,\nwith all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of\nlife sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be\nworshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love is\nher love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of the\nengineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is\nbeautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glass\nwindow is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is bound\nto come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great rough\nhand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the new\nchurch shall be known by men because it will be a day in which all\nworship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy house\nshall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries under\nthe sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid at\nher feet.\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\nPROPHETS\n\n\nThe world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating,\nthe strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in\npoetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the\nchurch, religion will call itself something else. It is the business\nof a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were some\nother age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born in\nit is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in an\nage are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in a\nparticular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries to\ndo for him the better. If a church does not believe in a man's work as\nhe believes in it, does not see some divine meaning and spirit in it\nand give him honor and standing and dignity for the divine meaning in\nit; if it is a church in which labor is secretly despised and in which\nit is openly patronized, in which a man has more honor for working\nfeebly with his brain than for working passionately and perfectly with\nhis hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. It is\nexcommunicated by the will of Heaven and the nature of things, from\nthe only Communion that is large enough for a man to belong to or for\na God to bless.\n\nIf there is one sign rather than another of religious possibility and\nspiritual worth in the men who do the world's work with machines\nto-day, it is that these men are never persuaded to attend a church\nthat despises that work.\n\nSymposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is no\nneed for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the\nhouse-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church\nthat believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership\nin the world. \"Why should I pay pew rent,\" says the man who sings with\nhis hands, \"to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men who\ndo not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?\" If heaven\nitself (represented as a rich and idle place,--seats free in the\nevening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that he\nshould despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find some\nexcuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard to\nhis present life. \"Unless your God,\" says the man who sings with his\nhands, to those who pity him and do him good,--\"unless your God is a\nGod I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in a\nchurch.\"\n\nBehold it is written: The church that does not delight in these men\nand in what these men are for, as much as the street delights in them,\nshall give way to the street. The street is more beautiful. If the\nstreet is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church and\nsweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above\nit. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall men\nlook down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than the\nworld believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. It\ncannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, and\nthat cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of\nthat machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not\nworthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a\nbetter religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every\ntown or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,\none hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for\nmore than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.\nThe telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other\ngreat believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are\nsurrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the\nsteeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the\npeople. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of\nchimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are\nsaying to the people.\n\nThey will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.\n\nThey will say it better.\n\nIn the meantime they are not listening.\n\nReligion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with\ntheir ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By\nall poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading\nbefore them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that\nreaches across the age.\n\n      RAILROAD CROSSING\n    LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!\n\n\n\n\nPART II.\n\nTHE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES\n\n\n\n\nI\n\nAS GOOD AS OURS\n\n\nOne is always hearing it said that if a thing is to be called poetic\nit must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them.\nThe idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection\nthat, while a machine may have great ideas in it, \"it does not look\nit.\" The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it\nstands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language of\nthe average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it is\nactually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is often\nabsurd. It is a rare machine which, when one looks for poetry in it,\ndoes not make itself ridiculous.\n\nThe only answer that can be made to this objection is that a\nsteam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as well\nas the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We\nlive in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything\nin it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over\nour heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height of\nabsurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when\nwe look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at\nstrictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To\nsuppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose\nthat He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express\nanything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.\n\nWe cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of\neverything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do\nour living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselves\nwith--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and\nfootball have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them\nfrom the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey\nanything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying\non a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense\nand spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a\nnew fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it,\nto a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the\nbeginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could\nnot possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more\nfutile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul\nthan a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may\nbe all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a\nfailure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musical\ninstruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing a\nblack stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listen\nsolemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tucked\nunder his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughing\nand crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language of\nthe violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivated\nenough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful and\nimportant parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracy\nof symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that\ncan not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing\ncould possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a\ntourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebration\nof the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have their\nouter senses, and these outer senses have to be learned one at a time\nby being flashed through with inner ones. Except to people who have\ntried it, nothing could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form of\nhuman expression. A reception--a roomful of people shouting at each\nother three inches away--is comical enough. So is handshaking. Looked\nat from the outside, what could be more unimpressive than the\nspectacle of the greatest dignitary of the United States put in a vise\nin his own house for three hours, having his hand squeezed by long\nrows of people? And, taken as a whole, scurrying about in its din,\nwhat could possibly be more grotesque than a great city--a city looked\nat from almost any adequate, respectable place for an immortal soul to\nlook from--a star, for instance, or a beautiful life?\n\nWhether he is looked at by ants or by angels, every outer token that\npertains to man is absurd and unfinished until some inner thing is put\nwith it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to the other\nanimals), rushing empty about space. New York is a spectacle for a\nsquirrel to laugh at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man is\na mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, desk-infesting animal.\n\nAll these things being true of expression--both the expression of men\nand of God--the fact that machines which have poetry in them do not\nexpress it very well does not trouble me much. I do not forget the\nlook of the first ocean-engine I ever saw--four or five stories of it;\nnor do I forget the look of the ocean-engine's engineer as in its\nmighty heart-beat he stood with his strange, happy, helpless \"Twelve\nthousand horse-power, sir!\" upon his lips.\n\nThat first night with my first engineer still follows me. The time\nseems always coming back to me again when he brought me up from his\nwhirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of stars, and left me--my new\nwonder all stumbling through me--alone with them and with my thoughts.\n\n  The engines breathe.\n  No sound but cinders on the sails\n  And the ghostly heave,\n  The voice the wind makes in the mast--\n  And dainty gales\n  And fluffs of mist and smoking stars\n  Floating past--\n  From night-lit funnels.\n\n  In the wild of the heart of God I stand.\n  Time and Space\n  Wheel past my face.\n  Forever. Everywhere.\n  I alone.\n  Beyond the Here and There\n  Now and Then\n  Of men,\n  Winds from the unknown\n  Round me blow\n  Blow to the unknown again.\n\n  Out in its solitude I hear the prow\n  Beyond the silence-crowded decks\n  Laughing and shouting\n  At Night,\n  Lashing the heads and necks\n  Of the lifted seas,\n  That in their flight\n  Urge onward\n  And rise and sweep and leap and sink\n  To the very brink\n  Of Heaven.\n\n  Timber and steel and smoke\n  And Sleep\n  Thousand-souled\n  A quiver,\n  A deadened thunder,\n  A vague and countless creep\n  Through the hold,\n  The weird and dusky chariot lunges on\n  Through Fate.\n  From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes\n  Above the houses of the deep\n  Their shadowy haunches fall and rise\n  --O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs\n  The flying of their hoofs,\n  Through the wonder and the dark\n  Where skies and waters meet\n  The shimmer of manes and knees\n  Dust of seas...\n  The sound of breathing, urge, confusion\n  And the beat, the starlight beat\n  Soft and far and stealthy-fleet\n  Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nON BEING BUSY AND STILL\n\n\nOne of the hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines\n(excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the\nphonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed\nto talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey,\nand, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being\nimpressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed\nbecause it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked\nthrough its nose.\n\nThe more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to\nknow it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his\nimagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the\noutside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a\ntwin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.\nThis is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its\npoetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in\nthe big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy\npaddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in\nthe sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.\n\nPeople who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit that\nthere is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A\nDutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved so\nmuch that it does not flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it\nat all. The same general principle holds good with every machine that\nhas been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works on\nit, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, if\none watches it in its various stages, always consists in making a\nmachine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive,\npuffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, was\nmuch more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the present\none, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was more\nimpressive than the present one. Every one remembers it,--the\nimportant-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty\nyears ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaseless\nwater-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and its\nhuge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations,\nringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It was\nimpossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without always\nthinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was always\ndoing things--now at one end of the train and now at the other,\nringing its bell down the track, blowing in at the windows, it fumed\nand spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to get\nto Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines\nwere made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, and\nscarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he is\ngoing, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that.\n\nThe modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silent\nones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of\nspace--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting the\nworld--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, for\nthe very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are less\nshowy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect.\n\nIn proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses to\nlook as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost always\na sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some one\nelse. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is a\ngiant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding,\nis not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists at\nall in the modern age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it\nexists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep bass\nsteamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam,\nwhich any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fashioned\npoetry. Every time it whistled it stopped.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nON NOT SHOWING OFF\n\n\nIt is not true to say that the modern man does not care for poetry. He\ndoes not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. He\ncares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care for\neloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks\nto win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts,\nand if the votes are to be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The\ndoctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the most\nagreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like the\ndoctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He even prescribes less,\nand the reason that it is hard to be a modern minister (already cut\ndown from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is that\none has to practise more than one can preach.\n\nTo be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more than\none says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelve\nhundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life around\nthem is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out\nin the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life.\nThe prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people who\nhave a gift for praying that way go, but the majority of\npeople--people who have discovered that there are a thousand other\nways of praying, and who like them better--stay away.\n\nWhen the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed\non the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The\nmessages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all\nimproves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of\na hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is\nhis duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough\none--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from\nthe inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on\nthe outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like\nselfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it\ncounts.\n\nOn the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the\ntwentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not\nbeen known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a\nglass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to\ndiscover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the\nancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would\nnot have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact\nthat Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new\nheaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of\nit. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope\ninvented later, which never worked.\n\nNothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R----\ntypewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must\nhave said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The\nmachine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and\nends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line\nwith his foot.\n\nThe same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery\nand through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The\novershot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion,\nliterature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common men\nbegan to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came\nin--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no\ndenying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its\nwork with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but\nit soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the\ndrippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the\nturbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work.\nThe water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand\nhorses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as\nsix turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the\nFalls.\n\nThe main fact about the modern man as regards poetry is, that he\nprefers poetry that has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It is\nbecause most of the poetry the modern man gets a chance to see to-day\nis merely going over the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal\nto the modern man. He supposes so himself. He supposes that a dynamo\n(forty street-cars on forty streets, flying through the dark) is not\npoetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, spellbound, more\nthan any poetry that is being written. The things that are hidden--the\nthings that are spiritual and wondering--are the ones that appeal to\nhim. The idle, foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He gropes in\nhis own body silently, harmlessly with the X-ray, and watches with awe\nthe beating of his heart. He glories in inner essences, both in his\nlife and in his art. He is the disciple of the X-ray, the defier of\nappearances. Why should a man who has seen the inside of matter care\nabout appearances, either in little things or great? Or why argue\nabout the man, or argue about the man's God, or quibble with words?\nPerhaps he is matter. Perhaps he is spirit. If he is spirit, he is\nmatter-loving spirit, and if he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter.\nEvery time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes it (as God makes\nmountains out of sunlight) a material thing. Every time he touches a\nmaterial thing, in proportion as he touches it mightily he brings out\ninner light in it. He spiritualizes it. He abandons the glistening\nbrass knocker--pleasing symbol to the outer sense--for a tiny knob on\nhis porch door and a far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass knocker\ndoes not appeal to the spirit enough for the modern man, nor to the\nimagination. He wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bell\nwith. He loves to wake the unseen. He will not even ring a door-bell\nif he can help it. He likes it better, by touching a button, to have a\ndoor-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellar\nchewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs\nwith a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He may be seen riding\nin three stories along his streets, but he takes his engines all off\nthe tracks and crowds them into one engine and puts it out of sight.\nThe more a thing is out of the sight of his eyes the more his soul\nsees it and glories in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden water\nspouts over his head and pours beneath his feet through his house.\nHidden light creeps through the dark in it. The more might, the more\nsubtlety. He hauls the whole human race around the crust of the earth\nwith a vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids--sixty miles an\nhour--with invisible air. He photographs the tone of his voice on a\nplatinum plate. His voice reaches across death with the platinum\nplate. He is heard of the unborn. If he speaks in either one of his\nworlds he takes two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut in with\none. If he lives in either he wraps the other about him. He makes men\nwalk on air. He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks open\nmountains with gas. The more perfect he makes his machines the more\nspiritual they are, the more their power hides itself. The more the\nmachines of the man loom in human life the more they reach down into\nsilence, and into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. The\ninfinity which is the man's infinity is their infinity. The machines\ngrasp all space for him. They lean out on ether. They are the man's\nmachines. The man has made them and the man worships with them. From\nthe first breath of flame, burning out the secret of the Dust to the\nlast shadow of the dust--the breathless, soundless shadow of the dust,\nwhich he calls electricity--the man worships the invisible, the\nintangible. Electricity is his prophet. It sums him up. It sums up his\nmodern world and the religion and the arts of his modern world. Out of\nall the machines that he has made the electric machine is the most\nmodern because it is the most spiritual. The empty and futile look of\na trolley wire does not trouble the modern man. It is his instinctive\nexpression of himself. All the habits of electricity are his habits.\nElectricity has the modern man's temperament--the passion of being\ninvisible and irresistible. The electric machine fills him with\nbrotherhood and delight. It is the first of the machines that he can\nnot help seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the man's highest\nself. His own soul beckons to him out of it.\n\nAnd the more electricity grows the more like the man it grows, the\nmore spirit-like it is. The telegraph wire around the globe is melted\ninto the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away from\nthe dust. They envelop the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at\nlast, unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light of\nstars,--fights its way to God.\n\nThe man no longer gropes in the dull helpless ground or through the\nfroth of heaven for the spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which\nmakes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makes\nearth out of air, he delves into the deepest sea as a cloud. He\nstrides heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment at last of\nELECTRICITY--the archangel of matter.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD\n\n\nReligion consists in being proud of the Creator. Poetry is largely the\nsame feeling--a kind of personal joy one takes in the way the world is\nmade and is being made every morning. The true lover of nature is\ntouched with a kind of cosmic family pride every time he looks up from\nhis work--sees the night and morning, still and splendid, hanging over\nhim. Probably if there were another universe than this one, to go and\nvisit in, or if there were an extra Creator we could go to--some of\nus--and boast about the one we have, it would afford infinite relief\namong many classes of people--especially poets.\n\nThe most common sign that poetry, real poetry, exists in the modern\nhuman heart is the pride that people are taking in the world. The\ntypical modern man, whatever may be said or not said of his religion,\nof his attitude toward the maker of the world, has regular and almost\ndaily habits of being proud of the world.\n\nIn the twentieth century the best way for a man to worship God is\ngoing to be to realize his own nature, to recognize what he is for,\nand be a god, too. We believe to-day that the best recognition of God\nconsists in recognizing the fact that he is not a mere God who does\ndivine things himself, but a God who can make others do them.\n\nLooked at from the point of view of a mere God who does divine things\nhimself, an earthquake, for instance, may be called a rather feeble\naffair, a slight jar to a ball going ---- miles an hour--a Creator\ncould do little less, if He gave a bare thought to it--but when I\nwaked a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in my own house as\nif it were a hammock, and was told that some men down in Hazardville,\nConnecticut, had managed to shake the planet like that, with some\ngunpowder they had made, I felt a new respect for Messrs. ---- and Co.\nI was proud of man, my brother. Does he not shake loose the Force of\nGravity--make the very hand of God to tremble? To his thoughts the\nvery hills, with their hearts of stone, make soft responses--when he\nthinks them.\n\nThe Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in '76, under its sky of iron and\nglass, is remembered by many people the day they saw it first as one\nof the great experiences of life. Like some vast, Titanic spirit, soul\nof a thousand, thousand wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mighty\nsilence there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve-year-old boy, at\nleast, the thought of the hour he spent with that engine first is a\nthought he sings and prays with to this day. His lips trembled before\nit. He sought to hide himself in its presence. Why had no one ever\ntaught him anything before? As he looks back through his life there is\none experience that stands out by itself in all those boyhood\nyears--the choking in his throat--the strange grip upon him--upon his\nbody and upon his soul--as of some awful unseen Hand reaching down\nSpace to him, drawing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed child\nbeing held up before It--held up to an infinite fact, that he might\nlook at it again and again.\n\nThe first conception of what the life of man was like, of what it\nmight be like, came to at least one immortal soul not from lips that\nhe loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice behind a desk,\nbut from a machine. To this day that Corliss engine is the engine of\ndreams, the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and to the soul. It\nrebuilds the universe. It is the opportunity of beauty throughout\nlife, the symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of the unity of\nnations, and of the worship of God. In silence--like the soft far\nrunning of the sky--it wrought upon him there; like some heroic human\nspirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, through miles of aisles, and\ncrowds of gazers, it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as the\nbeat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering matter, of the clay\nconquering God.\n\nLike some wonder-crowded chorus its voices surrounded me. It was the\nfirst hearing of the psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was like\nthe spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it--nay, the\nvision that was builded in it--was the vision of the age to be: the\nvision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone of\nhis sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of his\nsoul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, and\nwith the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship with\nCreation morning, and into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion)\nof the might and gentleness of God.\n\nThere seem to be two ways to worship Him. One way is to gaze upon the\ngreat Machine that He has made, to watch it running softly above us\nall, moonlight and starlight, and winter and summer, rain and\nsnowflakes, and growing things. Another way is to worship Him not only\nbecause He has made the vast and still machine of creation, in the\nbeating of whose days and nights we live our lives, but because He has\nmade a Machine that can make machines--because out of the dust of the\nearth He has made a Machine that shall take more of the dust of the\nearth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd it into steel and iron and\nsay, \"Go ye now, depths of the earth--heights of heaven--serve ye me.\nI, too, am God. Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the\nspirit that is in thee is my spirit. I also--even I also--am God!\"\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nA MODEST UNIVERSE\n\n\nI have heard it objected that a machine does not take hold of a man\nwith its great ideas while he stands and watches it. It does not make\nhim feel its great ideas. And therefore it is denied that it is\npoetic.\n\nThe impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts of machinery is not\ndenied. What seems to be lacking in the machines from the artistic\npoint of view at present is a mere knack of making the faces plain and\nliteral-looking. Grasshoppers would be more appreciated by more people\nif they were made with microscopes on,--either the grasshoppers or the\npeople.\n\nIf the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain and\nlarge enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by\nit. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have\nbeen) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies\ntowering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a\ngrasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across\nvalleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and\nvillages--would have been one of the impressive features of human\nlife. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a\ngrasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was\ncreative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of\nhaving such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping\nsoftly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and\nyet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread\nover several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not\nimpressed by it.\n\nBut it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There\nis something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of\nmachinery. \"The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is\nnot poetic.\" \"A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as\nits form expresses its nature.\" Mechanical inventions may stand for\nimpressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the\nfacts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses\nthose facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of\nbattle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full of\ndynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not.\n\nThat depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not\nbe impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping\ntoward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it,\nif he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and\ncriticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember\nthe day when he all but lost his life because\n\n  A pill-box by the river's brim\n  A simple pill-box was to him\n  And nothing more.\n\nWordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an\nissue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its\nlanguage, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it\nlooks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The\nlanguage is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new\nlanguage, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a\nlanguage, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry\nin machinery.\n\nThe inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it\ndoes not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I,\ncomrade nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor God's\nmachine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the\nmeaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we\nare indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile,\ncreeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles\naway. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its\nInventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The\nninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of\nour souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not\nHERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our\nveins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is\nborn of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the\nimmeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to\nbe--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to\ndumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over\nthe pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the\ninfinite, beckon and are still.\n\nI am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express\nthemselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know\nthat when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looks\nout upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, with\ntheir huge machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out upon me.\nI rest.\n\nI know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of\nthe world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my\nsoul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me I\ngrow strong and glad.\n\n\n\n\nPART THREE\n\nTHE MACHINES AS POETS\n\n\n\n\nI\n\nPLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS\n\n\nI have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the\nmain lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near by\nand the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about\nart. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we\nhave generally, the kind people used to have more than they do\nnow--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of things\none wishes one had said, afterward.\n\nWe always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about\nother things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time,\nthat in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things\nThat Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.\n\nBrim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than I\nhave a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stop\nto it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this world\nthat have been beautiful a long while, without having people--well,\npeople like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all these\nmodern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there is\nsomething one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough to\ngo with the rest. I'm afraid Brim gets a little personal in talking\nwith me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in a\nconversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem to\nlead logically to one's going away, and trying to find afterwards,\nsome thing that is the matter with him.\n\n\"The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is,\" I say (on paper, afterwards,\nas the train speeds away), \"that you have a false-classic or\nStucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked all\nthese things--trolley cars, cables, locomotives,--seen the beautiful\nin them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the way\nwe do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when one\nthinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeks\nliked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would\nlike now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin to\nenjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the\nchance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more\nout of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I\nsuspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William\nWatson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in\nSchenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anything\nelse for the rest of their natural lives.\"\n\nI can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the\nmachines that a Greek would see, as yet.\n\nBut I have seen enough.\n\nI have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small\nenough, welding the nations together before my eyes.\n\nI have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of\nvisions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the\nworld.\n\nI have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men--the five thousand of\nthem--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted\nrailroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them\nthere with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities,\nputting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that\nBliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them ...\nbrother-artists every one ... in the glory ... in the dark ...\nVulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skyscrapers,\nsteam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and\nthe earth.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nHEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH\n\n\nThe poetry of machinery to-day is a mere matter of fact--a part of the\ndaily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing the\nworld wants to know about machinery is not that there is poetry in it,\nbut that the poetry which the common people have already found there,\nhas a right to be there. We have the fact. It is the theory to put\nwith the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles us\nmost. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solid\ncomfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory to\napprove of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make very\nmuch difference.\n\n1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is an expression of the soul.\n\n2. It expresses the soul (1) of the individual man who creates the\nmachine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine the\nengineer.\n\n3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God who can make men who can\nthus express their souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the least\nsense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like this\nis not clever enough with all his powers to find a God, and to worship\na God, he can worship himself. It is because the poetry of machinery\nis the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead of\nimmeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally taken\nfor granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned more\nof the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machines\nthat have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than from\nthe poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousand\nmen and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and has\nhis bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed by\nAbraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--the\nargument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight the\nlocomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whether\nit wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered by\nsteamships. It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new one.\nSeers and poets have made poetry out of it for two thousand years.\nMachinery is making the poetry mean something. Every new invention in\nmatter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with\nideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it than\nwas ever dreamed of in Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard to\nshow that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the most\nliterary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events of\nthe nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought that\nany one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is more\nwonderful than anything that has ever been said on it.\n\n\"This is all very true,\" interrupts the Logical Person, \"about\nprinting presses and looms and everything else--one could go on\nforever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loom\nhas made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browning\nwould have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loom\nhas freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is a\nfit theme for poetry.\" \"Besides\"--breaks in the Minor Poet--\"there is\na difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its being\nbeautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautiful\nthe way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?\"\n\nThis brings to a point the whole question as to where the definition\nof beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing's\nbeing considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question\n\"Is a thing beautiful?\" resolves itself into \"How large has a\nbeautiful thing a right to be?\" A man's theory of beauty depends, in a\nuniverse like this, upon how much of the universe he will let into it.\nIf he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and\npassions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if a\nbeautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggests\nboundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It is\nsomething--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever it\nis or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life\nis getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they\nsee more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental\nidea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetry\nwere made--most of them--before infinity was discovered.\n\nInfinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind of\nhuge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but the\nidea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us or\nwith our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to do\nwith IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience of\ninfinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparatively\nspeaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more modern\ndiscovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modern\nmachinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention for\nbeing infinite.\n\nThe machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing\nthe same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time\nand space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this\nvery day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity\nshall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the\nother. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little\ndifference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is\neverywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as\nmuch a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The\nlocomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives\nher a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches\nthe life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of\ninfinity.\n\nThis would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional\npoetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our\ntraditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established\ninstitution in human life, and infinity is not.\n\nNo one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world\nwas largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were\nafraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over\nthem. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people\nto forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably\nemployed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured\npoliceman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.\n\nThe Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference\nwas, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky\noff, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a\nkind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and\nhomelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the\nsky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough.\nMaking it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it\nbeautiful.\n\nGalileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another\nway--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to\nmake it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new\nreligion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the\nceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars,\nits film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the\npast. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our\nhuman lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests'\nwilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with\nlittle painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.\n\nIt is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has\nseen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what\nis over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out\nat last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about\nphilosophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main fact\nabout us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands of\nyears, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding\nthemselves.\n\nBut not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by\na new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud\nof steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love,\nthe new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of\nnights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with\nfalling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws\ndown Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It\nis a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new\nwidemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and\nwaters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.\n\nThe Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us--the mere\nhiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God--is the\nneighborhood of human life.\n\nMachinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses\nthe greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that\nthe soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.\n\nMachinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of\ninfinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is\ninfinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is.\nThe infinity of man is no longer a thing that the poet takes--that he\nmakes an idea out of--Machinery makes it a matter of fact.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nTHE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE\n\n\nThe main thing the nineteenth century has done in literature has been\nthe gradual sorting out of poets into two classes--those who like the\ninfinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and those who have not. It\nseems reasonable to say that the poets who have habits of infinity, of\nspace-conquering (like our vast machines), who seek the suggestive and\nimmeasurable in the things they see about them--poets who like\ninfinity, will be the poets to whom we will have to look to reveal to\nus the characteristic and real poetry of this modern world. The other\npoets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the modern world, to\nsay nothing of singing in it. They do not feel at home in it. The\nclassic-walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. It is too\nsavagely large, too various and unspeakable and unfinished. He looks\nat the sky of it--the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, to which it\nsings and lifts itself--with a strange, cold, hidden dread down in his\nheart. To him it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness.\nIts literature--its art with its infinite life in it, is a blur of\nvagueness. He complains because mobs of images are allowed in it. It\nis full of huddled associations. When Carlyle appeared, the\nStucco-Greek mind grudgingly admitted that he was 'effective.' A man\nwho could use words as other men used things, who could put a pen down\non paper in such a way as to lift men out from the boundaries of their\nlives and make them live in other lives and in other ages, who could\nlend them his own soul, had to have something said about him;\nsomething very good and so it was said, but he was not an \"artist.\"\nFrom the same point of view and to the same people Browning was a mere\ngreat man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a man who went\nabout living and loving things, with a few blind words opening the\neyes of the blind. It had to be admitted that Robert Browning could\nmake men who had never looked at their brothers' faces dwell for days\nin their souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, too, seer,\nlover, singer, standing in the turmoil of his violins conquering a new\nheaven for us, had great conceptions and was a musical genius without\nthe slightest doubt, but he was not an \"artist.\" He never worked his\nconceptions out. His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. They\nare nothing if they are not played again and again. For twenty or\nthirty years Richard Wagner was outlawed because his music was\ninfinitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres). People seemed\nto want him to write cosy, homelike music.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nSYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART\n\n  \"_So I drop downward from the wonderment\n  Of timelessness and space, in which were blent\n  The wind, the sunshine and the wanderings\n  Of all the planets--to the little things\n  That are my grass and flowers, and am content._\"\n\n\nThis prejudice against the infinite, or desire to avoid as much as\npossible all personal contact with it, betrays itself most commonly,\nperhaps, in people who have what might be called the domestic feeling,\nwho consciously or unconsciously demand the domestic touch in a\nlandscape before they are ready to call it beautiful. The typical\nAmerican woman, unless she has unusual gifts or training, if she is\nleft entirely to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery. Even if her\nimagination has been somewhat cultivated and deepened, so that she\nfeels that a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in order to\nbe beautiful, she still chooses nooks and ravines, as a rule, to be\nhappy in--places roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in with\nbeauty on every side. She is not without her due respect and\nadmiration for a mountain, but she does not want it to be too large,\nor too near the stars, if she has to live with it day and night; and\nif the truth were told--even at its best she finds a mountain distant,\nimpersonal, uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she does not see\nbeauty in the wide plain. There is something in her being that makes\nher bashful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she can snuggle up\nto. It is essentially the bird's taste in scenery. \"Give me a nest, O\nLord, under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy glory.\" A bush or a\ntree with two or three other bushes or trees near by, and just enough\nsky to go with it--is it not enough?\n\nThe average man is like the average woman in this regard except that\nhe is less so. The fact seems to be that the average human being (like\nthe average poet), at least for everyday purposes, does not want any\nmore of the world around him than he can use, or than he can put\nsomewhere. If there is so much more of the world than one can use, or\nthan anyone else can use, what is the possible object of living where\none cannot help being reminded of it?\n\nThe same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge against\nthe infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pine\ntrees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasant\nthings about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look at\nthem in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they\nwould not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines\nsinging over them and watching them, every day and night, for the\nworld. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious\nmood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or\nunsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a\nsingle pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole\nskyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not want\na whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes as\nnear to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world like\nthis, could expect. It is the one tree of all others that profoundly\nsuggests, every time the light falls upon it or the wind stirs through\nit, THE THINGS THAT MAN CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlight\nand its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the monument of the\nwoods, to The Intangible, and The Invisible, to the spirituality of\nmatter. Who shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit of the\npine? And who, who has ever looked upon the pines--who has seen them\nclimbing the hills in crowds, drinking at the sun--has not felt that\nhowever we may take to them personally they are the Chosen People\namong the trees? To pass from the voice of them to the voice of the\ncommon leaves is to pass from the temple to the street. In the rest of\nthe forest all the leaves seem to be full of one another's din--of\nrattle and chatter--heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voice\nof every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, and\nthe whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice of\nthe sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-things\nthat human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from the\npresence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over our heads.\n\nNow it seems to me that the supremacy of the pine in the imagination\nis not that it is more beautiful in itself than other trees, but that\nthe beauty of the pine seems more symbolic than other beauty, and\nsymbolic of more and of greater things. It is full of the sturdiness\nand strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the tree to see the\nsky with, and its voice is the voice of the horizons, the voice of the\nmarriage of the heavens and the earth; and not only is there more of\nthe sky in it, and more of the kingdom of the air and of the place of\nSleep, but there is more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart\nof the earth. No other tree can be mutilated like the pine by the hand\nof man and still keep a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty\nabout it and about all the place where it stands. A whole row of them,\nwith their left arms cut off for passing wires, standing severe and\nstately, their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help being\nbeautiful. The beauty is symbolic and infinite. It cannot be taken\naway. If the entire street-side of a row of common, ordinary\nmiddle-class trees were cut away there would be nothing to do with the\nmaimed and helpless things but to cut them down--remove their misery\nfrom all men's sight. To lop away the half of a pine is only to see\nhow beautiful the other half is. The other half has the infinite in\nit. However little of a pine is left it suggests everything there is.\nIt points to the universe and beckons to the Night and the Day. The\ninfinite still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the prophet of trees.\nIn the sad lands it but grows more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit\nof the tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite--of\neverywhere--wherever its shadow falls. I have heard the sound of a\nhammer in the street and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine\nwoods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud catches the great empty\nspaces of night out of heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers\nall sound into itself--echoes it along the infinite.\n\nThe pine may be said to be the symbol of the beauty in machinery,\nbecause it is beautiful the way an electric light is beautiful, or an\nelectric-lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty that belong to\nlife: finite beauty, in that its beauty can be seen in itself, and\ninfinite beauty in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of the\nbeauty that cannot be seen, the beauty that dwells around it.\n\nWhat is going to be called the typical power of the colossal art,\nmyriad-nationed, undreamed of men before, now gathering in our modern\nlife, is its symbolic power, its power of standing for more than\nitself.\n\nEvery great invention of modern mechanical art and modern fine art has\nheld within it an extraordinary power of playing upon associations, of\nplaying upon the spirits and essences of things until the outer senses\nare all gathered up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were meant to\nbe melted, into inner ones. What is wrought before the eyes of a man\nat last by a great modern picture is not the picture that fronts him\non the wall, but a picture behind the picture, painted with the flame\nof the heart on the eternal part of him. It is the business of a great\nmodern work of art to bring a man face to face with the greatness from\nwhich it came. Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite,--and a\nman and a woman. A picture with this feeling of the infinite painted\nin it--behind it--which produces this feeling of the infinite in other\nmen by playing upon the infinite in their own lives, is a typical\nmodern masterpiece.\n\nThe days when the infinite is not in our own lives we do not see it.\nIf the infinite is in our own lives, and we do not like it there, we\ndo not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, or in a Corliss\nengine--a picture of the face of All-Man, mastering the\nearth--silent--lifted to heaven.\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nTHE MACHINES AS ARTISTS\n\n\nIt is not necessary, in order to connect a railway train with the\ninfinite, to see it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a huge\nwhite hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite as infinite\nflying through granite in Hoosac Mountain. Most people who do not\nthink there is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with flying\nthrough granite as a trait of the infinite in a locomotive, and yet\nthese same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to where\ninfinity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky somewhere)--if they\ncould watch one night after night plowing through planets--would want\na poem written about it at once.\n\nA man who has a theory he does not see poetry in a locomotive, does\nnot see it because theoretically he does not connect it with infinite\nthings: the things that poetry is usually about. The idea that the\ninfinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run on\na track (and be all the more infinite for not running off the track),\ndoes not occur to him. The first thing he does when he is told to look\nfor the infinite in the world is to stop and think a moment, where he\nis, and then look for it somewhere else.\n\nIt would seem to be the first idea of the infinite, in being infinite,\nnot to be anywhere else. It could not be anywhere else if it tried;\nand if a locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in and out of the\nfiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry in\nit are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matter\nof seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing it in enough of its actual\nrelations as it is, to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the\norder, the energy, and the restfulness of the whole universe are\npulsing there through its wheels.\n\nThe times when we do not feel poetry in a locomotive are the times\nwhen we are not matter-of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough of\nits actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makes\nanything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as\nthe symbol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded symbol of\neverything else in the universe--the summing up of everything\nelse--another whisper of God's.\n\nHave I not seen the great Sun Itself, from out of its huge heaven,\npacked in a seed and blown about on a wind? I have seen the leaves of\nthe trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listened\nwith my soul--thousands of years--I have heard The Night and The Day\ncreeping softly through mountains. People called it geology.\n\nIt seems that if a man cannot be infinite by going to the infinite, he\nis going to be infinite where he is. He is carving it on the hills,\ntunneling it through the rocks of the earth, piling it up on the crust\nof it, with winds and waters and flame and steel he is writing it on\nall things--that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The whole\nplanet is his signature.\n\nIf what the modern man is trying to say in his modern age is his own\ninfinity, it naturally follows that the only way a modern artist can\nbe a great artist in a modern age is to say in that age that man is\ninfinite, better than any one else is saying it.\n\nThe best way to express this infinity of man is to seek out the things\nin the life of the man which are the symbols of his infinity--which\nsuggest his infinity the most--and then play on those symbols and let\nthose symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program is\nsomething like this. The modern age means the infinity of man. Modern\nart means symbolism of man's infinity. The best symbol of the man's\ninfinity the poet can find, in this world the man has made, is The\nMachine.\n\nAt least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down\nthe long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud\nfloating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long\nwavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a\ngreat Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it\nalmost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud\npropelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen\na broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train\nof cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its\nwhistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire\nby night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither\nis the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning\nbuilding pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the\ncar-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid\nThing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this\nghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it,\ngathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away\ninto heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have\nseen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or\npassing of the spirit of the age.\n\nWhen I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting\nNumber Eight to Springfield.\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\nTHE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS\n\n\nIf we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats\nquietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then\ncould watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before our\neyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and their\nlast wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to\nknow why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their\nnew things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.\n\nPerhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be\narranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery\nseems to be to every man's personal everyday instinct and experience.\nWe have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it.\n\nI do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But\nthere is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one\npermission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable to\nenjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I felt\nI had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be\nskipped.\n\n1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.\n\n2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals\nthe nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.\n\n3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately\nexpressed.\n\n4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideas\nexpressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry and\nof the imagination and the soul--infinity and the two forms of\ninfinity, the liberty and the unity of man.\n\n5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinery\nbecause machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurable\nideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurable\nthings, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is in\nthe mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine is\nbeautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world\ncontains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unity\nof all men's lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is now\nbeing wrought out before our eyes upon the face of the earth.\n\n6. It is only from the point of view of a nightingale or a sonnet that\nthe aesthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be\ncriticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurable\nideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;\nthe more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, and\nupon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and\nsatisfying they are.\n\n7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will be\nthe man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. These\nideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about the\nlives of all of us--might be stated roughly as follows:\n\n  The idea of the incarnation--the god in the body of the man.\n  The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from others.\n  The idea of unity--the soul's rescue from its mere self.\n  The idea of the Spirit--the Unseen and Intangible.\n  The idea of immortality.\n  The cosmic idea of God.\n  The practical idea of invoking great men.\n  The religious idea of love and comradeship.\n\nAnd nearly every other idea that makes of itself a song or a prayer in\nthe human spirit.\n\n\n\n\nPART FOUR\n\nIDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES\n\n\n\n\nI\n\nTHE IDEA OF INCARNATION\n\n  \"_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,\n\n  And found it not--but many things beside;\n  Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.\n  And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.\n\n  Then wandering upward through the solid earth\n  With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,\n  I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,\n\n  And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie\n  Safe in the dust or ride along the sky--\n  Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'\"\n\n\nThe grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hop\nfor his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watching\nhim--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loom\nup on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one of\nthe great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumps\nforty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as well\nas any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make\ntwo hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course,\nthat the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolley\nto do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use things\noutside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everything\noutside him serve him as if he had it on his own body--uses a whole\nuniverse every day without the trouble of always having to carry it\naround with him. He gets his will out of the ground and even out of\nthe air. He lays hold of the universe and makes arms and legs out of\nit. If he wants at any time, for any reason, more body than he was\nmade with, he has his soul reach out over or around the planet a\nlittle farther and draw it in for him.\n\nThe grasshopper, so far as I know, does not differ from the man in\nthat he has a soul and body both, but his soul and body seem to be\nperfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably the\nbest (and the worst) that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if he\nhas one, that it is in his legs--that he really has his wits about\nhim.\n\nLooked at superficially, or from the point of view of the next hop, it\ncan hardly be denied that the body the human soul has been fitted out\nwith is a rather inferior affair. From the point of view of any\nrespectable or ordinarily well-equipped animal the human body--the one\naccorded to the average human being in the great show of\ncreation--almost looks sometimes as if God really must have made it as\na kind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on the\nrest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very moment\nhe was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the\nanimals man should be immortal--and had let it go at that. With the\nexception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra\nfold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the most\nunexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedingly\nunlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to\nany one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with our hands and\nfeet, any animal on earth could tell us, are things we do not do as\nwell as men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as well as we did\nwhen we were born. Our very babies are our superiors.\n\nThe only defence we are able to make when we are arraigned before the\nbar of creation, seems to be, that while some of the powers we have\nexhibited have been very obviously lost, we have gained some very fine\nnew invisible ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all,--our\nnerves, for instance,--the mentalized condition of our organs. And\nthen, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter.\nWhen we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the\njudgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking\nat us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion,\nwe hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in\nus. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well\nour bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean\nis, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large,\nor in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well\narranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a\nsuperior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to\nappreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can\ndeny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale,\nlittle stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on\nthis earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we\ncan. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before\nThe Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all\nsummer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost\nalways under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it\nlikes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in\nthousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we\ncan well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughter\nat us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishes\npeeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still,\nunderworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling,\nin a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, it\nis true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on the\nplanet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of staying\ncarefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much by\nourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise,\ncalled civilization, we keep each other in countenance after a\nfashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when we\nstop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the others\nsee us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to,\nand have it done with.\n\nIt is getting to be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up and\ndown the world,--looking upon the man's body,--the little funny one\nthat he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking upon\nthe one that he really has. When one considers what a man actually\ndoes, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he\nhas been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of\ncentral nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of\ninfinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, of\nNothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There\nis something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out and\nincomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say,\nbut not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently,\nis a kind of light there is in it.\n\nBut the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same light\nthat reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames upon\nheaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it,\nI have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and\nworshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great waters\nand the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for a\nbody, which the man has.\n\nI go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash of\nblack and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death,\ndisgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills,\nand the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn the\npapers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out through\nthe dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and the\nPhilippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices of\nthe nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the\nman. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of the\nman meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watched\nthem on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power,\nninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, ... thundering aisles of\nsouls ... on into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of the\nman.\n\nAnd when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently across\nheaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of the\nman is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, over\nit, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look,\nsince I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon the countenance\nof the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or resting\nin the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reaches\nout around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars and\nbeyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, that\nshall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wireless\ntelegraph and steel, or know the sound of its going? Now, when I see\nit, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. Like a low thunder it\nreaches around the crust of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle\nbody (oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over the hill of the\nsea, soft and stately as the walking of the clouds in the upper air.\n\nIs there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always\ncoming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the\ndark, \"And I am here, too!\"\n\nHas the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel\nHimself?\n\nAnd so it has come to pass, this vision I have seen with my own\neyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body,\ngoing triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and Space.\nWho is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a\ndream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his\nhand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the\nwhole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist,\nthe glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of\nthe ships.\n\n  Between the seas and skies\n  The Shuttle flies\n  Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep,\n  Thousand-sailed,\n  Half in waking, half in sleep.\n\n  Glistening calms and shouting gales\n  Water-gold and green,\n  And many a heavenly-minded blue\n  It thrusts and shudders through,\n  Past my starlight,\n  Past the glow of suns I know,\n  Weaving fates,\n  Loves and hates\n  In the Sea--\n  The stately Shuttle\n  To and fro,\n  Mast by mast,\n  Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.\n  Flights of Days and Nights\n  Flies fast.\n\nIt may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the\nmodern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and\nholding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that\nmachinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging\nfor myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded\ninto their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a\ngreat foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and\nthe souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities,\nmaking the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and\nrolling out the roads of continents.\n\nIf this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet\nthere are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against\nus--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have\nalmost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man\nwondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely\nhammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for\nhim, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man\nand fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He\nought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he\nlives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him,\n\"Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?\"\n\nThe trains like spirits flock to him.\n\nThere are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my\npocket it sings.\n\nIn the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.\n\nI have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale\nand small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to\ntell the truth.\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nTHE IDEA OF SIZE\n\n\nSometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount\nTom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in\nmachinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely\nbeing polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain,\nnot wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no\nplace for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the\ntrouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.\nThen suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening\nparticularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and\nthe hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and\nsymbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity\nand Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets\nworse than other people's genealogies.\n\nBut all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just\nover the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations\nas one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they\nwill not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It\nwould be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be\nagreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious\nmatter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of\ncourse, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the\nrisk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next\nfew pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nSome people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a\nregular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I\ndo not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must\nsay that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I\nwould be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very\nsmall, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are\nmore interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering\ngenerality.\n\nI do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at\nleast I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking\ndown from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever\nit is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for\nme does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very\nlarge. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling,\nevery day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very\nconveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I\nlike. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, \"Are not\nthe whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always\nat my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a\nworld to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds\nI cannot see.\"\n\nThe next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on\nis a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What I\nreally seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small\nor large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken\niron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of\nthem, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.\nI have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the\nwork that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be\ndone by men, there would not be standing room for them on the\nglobe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much\nof the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it,\nevery year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing\nwe touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a\nyoung woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred\nmore just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do\nup the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or\nstable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it\ndoes not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or\nhow large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were\nall used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so\noften) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it\nout a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was\nmere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are\nthinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be\nold-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very\nbig earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spider\nthat could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be\nticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The\nuniverse has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a\nlittle compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a\npill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a\nsingle moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever\nbeen on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little\nwizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for\nthousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nTHE IDEA OF LIBERTY\n\n\nSome one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was\ngetting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in\nand helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day\nlooking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.\nI knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a\nmile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see\nthat I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings\nwere hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not\nget myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look at\nit impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the\nuniverse, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the\nsunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe\nbefore. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt\nthat history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.\n\nI have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it\nand got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my\nfriends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other\nuncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw\nit, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I\ndiscovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum\nfor all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it was\ngoing to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not\nget myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun\npeeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flustered\nme--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I\nfound myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what\nit would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to\nbe. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably\nbe too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.\n\nI had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelee last summer. I\nresented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.\n\nThe fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a\ncomparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only\nafforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It\ncould not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was\nunderneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. The\nfeeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could\nnot get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken\nbody and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been\nasked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted\nto or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground\nunderneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living\nevery day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being\nasked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and\nfound institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and\nruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in space to burn itself\nup--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or\nbit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time\nand pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to\nthe dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. \"You\nmight as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelee in the\nface,\" I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. \"Here you are, set\ndown helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something\nall fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust\nor geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any\nplace after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and\nall ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful\nceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is\nseething beneath your feet.\"\n\nIt is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of\nthis earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it,\nwithout having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round\nswindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with\nall of us on it, laughing at us.\n\nI felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelee broke out. I\nwent wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to\nget warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all\nsubjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It\nwas a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had\nlet through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground\nsimply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured\nthe earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.\nI had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming\nas the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the\nfires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss\nof outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and\ngradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both,\nboth sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would\nhave to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race\nwas going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little\nones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just\noutside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all in\na swirl of snowdrifts.\n\nI do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I\nhave always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human\ninterest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if\nthe earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract\nwith the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off\nall of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a\ncomparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far\nout at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual\ncapacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was\nsomething distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if\nwe had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this\ninjured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I\ncould not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out\nof the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing\nafar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.\n\nThen slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was\nstanding as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or\nflowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I\ndefied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to\nkeep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me,\nof an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if\nthe soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness\nwould be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an\ninventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of\nthe spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be\nmaltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had\nhe not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet,\nflung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homes\nout of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of\nthe mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.\n\nIt was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was\nwhen it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead\nof having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by\napparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great\nnations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All\nthe young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the ends\nor tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still\nat work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to\nhave things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any\nafternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and\nplaying duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.\n\nIt is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at\nany given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we\nlike.\n\nI do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just\nwhat the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would\nmake some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if\nthe sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged\nsomething, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely\nthat the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries\nfor nothing. The things they have done against him have been the\nmaking of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in\nthe earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him\nand left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew\nwhat to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has\nhad his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is\nonly lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think\nof something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world\nwith her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can\nonly be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he\nmakes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like\nthis are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath\nout of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with\npoisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers,\nand flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with\na little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in\nthe great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night\nlike dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a\nbreath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he\nis dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands\nof miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without\nthe copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought\nthousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need not\nfear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an\naction of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste\nof heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man\nlike this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms\nhim or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shall\nbe as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire\nand wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and\nNothing are his servants.\n\nThe vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics\nsaying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off\nneglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision\nof all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in\nfurs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep\nwarm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats\non giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.\nIt has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:\n\"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.\nSomebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At\nall events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet\nhe's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful\nimpossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking\nfor.\"\n\nA human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its\nstreet pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,\nwhich draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which\nhas its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is\nover the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights\nrailway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping\nthem, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a\nrace like this could not find some way at least of managing its own\nplanet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming\nit, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed\ndown in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the\nwaves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden\nalmost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at\nherself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things\nnowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock\ncompany or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that a\nthousand years from now we will not have found some other use for\nmoonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be\nmanufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating\nhouses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from\ndoor to door in cases and bottles.\n\nFirst and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with\na planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it,\noutwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea\nthat we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be\nmore likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we\nought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be\nmuch, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our\ncontinents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from\nthe center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what\nscience is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick\nout something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We\nmanufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet\nas we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things,\nwe will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one\nwants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and\nmechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected\nenough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwest\nhas just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the\nforce of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or\nflag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over\nthe edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of\ngravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a\nglance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or\nso (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.),\neverything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure\nwould gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When\ncompleted it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space\n(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and\nmore). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a\nconnection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one\nwould care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that\nwould always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up all\nthe raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on the\nothers. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station to\nthe planets in general that would be useful. They would know what we\nwant, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where we\ncould.\n\nAll this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult to\ntell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talking\nof a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is no\ntelling about him--that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going\nson of God and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on,\nwith quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes are\nprophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, Gentle\nReader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground is\nstill beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us notice\nstars more.\n\nIn the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affair\nlike this one single planet, need not worry us much.\n\nI still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeing\nit--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same\nold green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sun\ndoes. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and\nof love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man,\nrunning about and strutting, flying through space on it, all his\ninterests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning to\nworlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds or\nwith this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand or\ndeck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was.\nLong after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthest\nbreath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises around\nyou, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your round\nwhite cloud, rowing faithfully through space!\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nTHE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY\n\n\nIf I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around\nto my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not\nat all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I\nshould do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it was\nfor. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want\nto settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being\nconscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first\nthought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it\nmight be overdoing things a little.\n\nI can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men\nand women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I\nknow many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be\nlugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in\nimmortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I\nwere asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting\nout my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that\nwanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier\nand easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how\nlong they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure\nin it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and\nhad never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest\npreference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is\nonly half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have\nthe best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality\nI cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this\nvery moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United\nStates of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I\nfeel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to\nan infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or praying\nto Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging\nHim to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it\nsometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to\nHis face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes,\nand to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal\nthrobbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his\nsense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a\npetition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel\nas if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.\n\nI have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was\nasleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great\nblackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed\nout. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of\nlight--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through\nNothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, \"Now I will try to realize\nMotion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me....\" Ties\nflying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping\nghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The\nlong, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops\n(and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential,\nsemi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence,\nthey come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up\nevery one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and\nfurther. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.\nThe night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self,\nnothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the\nlong monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around\nand beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to\npick out with one's soul from Darkness. \"Here am I,\" I said as the\nroar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed\nthrough the blackness. \"Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of\nglimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my\nfeet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through\ndeserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and\nhold me.\"\n\nNo one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea\nand pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but\nit does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of\nappreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High\nStreet. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my\nown front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying\nthat Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or\nhorse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain\nmay be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must\nconfess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's\nimmortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in\nhis being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is\nhis sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and\nhis infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the\nspace there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is\nliving or staying, the universe is his real address.\n\nI have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide night\nand looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the\nswash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my\nboard in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered\nit in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of\nit--the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through me\nand chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, \"Where art thou?\" I\nlooked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself and\nupon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters.\n\n  A thousand breaths we lie\n  Shrouded limbs and faces\n  Horizontal\n  Packed in cases\n  In our named and numbered places,\n  Catalogued for sleep,\n  Trembling through the Godlight\n  Below, above,\n  Deep to Deep.\n\nHow a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to\nhave time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about\nanother--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if\nit were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters out\nfor having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--is\na problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a\ngrave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in\nanother world would ever really pay some people for the time they have\nwasted in this one, worrying about it.\n\nDoes any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as\nunimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I am\na parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist of\nworlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am\nnot living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe\n... with a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. The\nwhole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it.\nI have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--to\nthe uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit,\nwould move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night\nthey reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with\ndreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at\nleast as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I\ncare little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across\nmy soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other\nwhen I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related\nlife, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or\nnot,--takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of\nspace or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and\npetering along over a long, narrow row of years?\n\nThousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, and\nthrough the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked and\nprinted while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not\nknow that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam\nI say, \"There is my omnipresence.\" My being is busy out in the\nuniverse having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the\nworld are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to\nkeep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I\nlay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether\nI so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof\nfor me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.\n\n\nII\n\nI have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea of\nwhich seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who are\nworthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fashioned\nmethod that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practical\npurposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us,--are\nalready being woven in us. The author does not say it in so many\nwords, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual or\nsubtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we live\nas we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one.\n\nI can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to take\nthe time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infinite\nexperiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about another\nworld.\n\nIt is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in an\ninfinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managed\nthan one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do,\nis to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this.\nIf the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one,\nthen so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems a\nlittle abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and why\nnot leave it to God to work it out? He doesn't have to neglect\nanything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do it\nanyway.\n\nI have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of a\ntheory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly\nstill. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me,\nthrough all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deep\ngrass. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city in\nthe grass--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. I\nknow their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. And\nwhen I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds,\ntides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possess\nthem. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions of\nages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sun\nand the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Who\ncan shut me out from anybody's sunrise?\n\n  \"Oh, tenderly the haughty day\n  Fills his blue urn with fire;\n  One morn is in the mighty heaven\n  And one in my desire.\"\n\nI play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I can\ntelegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is no\nlonger a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, conducting a big\nfoolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helpless\ncities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it out\nfrom over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is my\nsky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has a\nmonopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I have\nmade an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky.\nThe soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares.\nMen go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift my\nhands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the hands\nof my hands I work with it. I say \"I and the sky.\" I say \"I and the\nEarth.\" We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached over\nwith the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--a\nkind of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfully\nout in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one of\nhis great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborly\nthought. God's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man have\nsignaled each other.\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nTHE IDEA OF GOD\n\n\nMy study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where I\nput it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of\nit--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand\nguard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;\nnearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down\nin my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming\ngently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I would\nnot believe it. \"Where?\" I would say, \"in which Bottle?\" I have groped\nfor one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping\nfor a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of\nancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events\nof the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed\non the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make\nout to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can.\n\nI know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that\nwhen the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in\nmy mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things,\npottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow\nand reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells me\ncautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he\nhas found Him, I wonder if he has.\n\nThe very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a world\nalive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey\nto search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would find\nwould be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his\nGod in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.\n\nIt does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain,\nrudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the very\nessence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for,\nin giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences.\nI suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with the\nscientist is not that he is material, but that he is not material\nenough,--he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot\nbelieve for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacle\nof matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed\nthing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--this\nspectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in a\nbottle for instance--a bottle which he places absolutely by itself,\nwould be able to find one if he tried. It seems to me that it is by\nletting one's self have one's infinite--one's infinitely related\nexperiences, and not by cutting them off that one comes to know a God.\nTo find a God who is everywhere one must at least spend a part of\none's time in being everywhere one's self--in relating one's knowledge\nto all knowledge.\n\nThere are various undergirding arguments and reasons, but the only way\nthat I really know there is an infinite God is because I am\ninfinite--in a small way--myself. Even the matter that has come into\nthe world connected with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. If\nmy soul, like some dim pale light left burning within me, were merely\nto creep to the boundaries of its own body, it would know there was a\nGod. The very flesh I live with every day is infinite flesh. From the\nfurthest rumors of men and women, the furthest edge of time and space\nmy soul has gathered dust to itself. I carry a temple about with me.\nIf I could do no better, and if there were need, I am my own\ncathedral. I worship when I breathe. I bow down before the tick of my\npulse. I chant to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of my\nfingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man ask\nme to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go\nout into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure there\nis a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the\nGod within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of the\nburning dust warmed me before the stars--made a hearth for my soul\nbefore them? I am at home with them. I sit daily before worlds as at\nmy own fireside.\n\nI suppose there is something intolerant and impatient and a little\nheartless about an optimist--especially the kind of optimism that is\nbased upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the structure of the\nworld. There is such a thing, I suppose, with some of us, as having a\nkind of devilish pride in faith, as one would say to ordinary mortals\nand creepers and considerers and arguers \"Oh now just see me believe!\"\nWe are like boys taking turns jumping in the Great Vacant Lot, seeing\nwhich can believe the furthest. We need to be reminded that a man\ncannot simply bring a little brag to God, about His world, and make a\nreligion out of it. I do not doubt in the least, as a matter of\ntheory, that I have the wrong spirit--sometimes--toward the scientific\nman who lives around the corner of my mind. It seems to me he is\nalways suggesting important-looking unimportant things. I have days of\nsympathizing with him, of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack\nup upon my shoulders and strapping it there. But before I know it I'm\noff. I throw it away or melt it down into a tablet or something--put\nit in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God.\n\nAnd the worst of it is, I think He intended me to. I think He intended\nme to know and to keep knowing daily what He has done for me and is\ndoing now, out in the universe, and what He has made me to do. I also\nam a God. From the first time I saw the sun I have been one daily. I\nhave performed daily all the homelier miracles and all the common\nfunctions of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into my being. Out\nof the air of heaven I have made flesh. I have taken earth from the\nearth and burned it within me and made it into prayers and into songs.\nI have said to my soul \"To eat is to sing.\" I worship all over. I am\nmy own sacrament. I lay before God nights of sleep, and the delight\nand wonder of the flesh I render back to Him again, daily, as an\noffering in His sight.\n\nAnd what is true of my literal body--of the joy of my hands and my\nfeet, is still more true of the hands of my hands.\n\nWhen I wake in the night and send forth my thought upon the darkness,\ntrack out my own infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky\nreaching around me, all telegraphed through with thought, and floored\nwith steel, I may have to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes),\nbut I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the door of heaven if\nthere is a heaven or needs to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory\nof the other worlds, has not science itself told me that they are a\npart of me and I a part of them? Nothing is that would not be\ndifferent without something else. My thoughts are ticking through the\nclouds, and the great sun itself is creeping through me daily down in\nmy bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a hundred seas. I turn\nover in my sleep at midnight and lay my hand on the noon. And when I\nhave slept and walk forth in the morning, the stars flow in my veins.\nWhy should a man dare to whine? \"Whine not at me!\" I have said to man\nmy brother. If you cannot sing to me do not interrupt me.\n\n  Let him sing to me\n  Who sees the watching of the stars above the day,\n  Who hears the singing of the sunrise\n  On its way\n  Through all the night.\n  Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms,\n  Whose soul has roamed\n  Infinite-homed\n  Through tents of Space,\n  His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms\n  All wonder.\n\n  Let him sing to me\n  Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover\n  Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds\n  The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife,\n  The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds,\n  Of His Own Life.\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\nTHE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE\n\n\n_AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN_\n\n  Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,\n  Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words\n  In the music-haunted houses of the birds,\n  Singers with the thrushes and pewees\n  In the glimmer-lighted roofs\n  Of the trees--\n  Unhand my soul!\n  Buds with singing in their hearts,\n  Birds with blooms upon their wings,\n  All the wandering whispers of delight,\n  The near familiar things;\n  Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,\n  Sounds of going in the grain\n  Shall not bind me to thy singing\n  When the sky with God is ringing\n  For the Joy of the Rain.\n  Sea and star and hill and thunder,\n  Dawn and sunset, noon and night,\n  All the vast processional of the wonder\n  Where the worlds are,\n  Where my soul is,\n  Where the shining tracks are\n  For the spirit's flight--\n  Lift thine eyes to these\n  From the haunts of dewdrops,\n  Hollows of the flowers,\n  Caves of bees\n  That sing like thee,\n  Only in their bowers;\n  From the stately growing cities\n  Of the little blowing leaves,\n  To the infinite windless eaves\n  Of the stars;\n  From the dainty music of the ground,\n  The dim innumerable sound\n  Of the Mighty Sun\n  Creeping in the grass,\n  Softest stir of His feet\n  (Where they go\n  Far and slow\n  On their immemorial beat\n  Of buds and seeds\n  And all the gentle and holy needs\n  Of flowers),\n  To the old eternal round\n  Of the Going of His Might,\n  Above the confines of the dark,\n  Odors and winds and showers,\n  Day and night,\n  Above the dream of death and birth\n  Flickering East and West,\n  Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth--\n  Where He wheels\n  And soars\n  And plays\n  In illimitable light,\n  Sends the singing stars upon their ways\n  And on each and every world\n  When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep\n  Is furled--\n  Pours the Days.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nThe first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric\ncars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home to\nsupper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The\nThing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been\nfound by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turned\non--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels,\nand run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out in\nthe darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I\nhad seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked\non in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more\nsurprised if I had met a star walking in the street.\n\n  In my deepest dream\n  I heard the Song\n  Running in my sleep\n  Through the lowest caves of Being\n  Down below\n  Where no sound is, sun is,\n  Hearing, seeing\n  That men know.\n\nThere was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars\nmoving, that made it all seem very old.\n\n\n_An Ode to the Lightning._\n\n  Before the first new dust of dream God took\n  For making man and hope and love and graves\n  Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods\n  Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow\n  Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,\n  The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague\n  To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept\n  From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff\n  That wove the worlds,\n  Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,\n  While still, hinged on nothing,\n  Dim and shapeless Things\n  And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings\n  Floated and waited.\n  Before the winds had breathed the breath of life\n  Or blown from wastes of Space\n  To Earth's creating place,\n  The souls of seeds\n  And ghosts of old dead stars,\n  The Lightning Spirit willed\n  Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.\n  --Primal fire of all desire\n  That leaps from men to men,\n  Brother of Suns\n  And all the Glorious Ones\n  That circle skies,\n  He flashed to these\n  The night that brought the birth,\n  The vision of the place\n  And raised his awful face\n  To all their glittering crowds,\n  And cried from where It lay\n  --A tiny ball of fire and clay\n  In swaddling clothes of clouds,\n  \"Behold the Earth!\"\n\n         *     *     *     *     *\n         *     *     *     *     *\n\n  Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer\n  Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!\n  Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.\n  Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven\n  And heaven and Heaven's heaven.  Oh thou whose play\n  Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_)\n  --And call from holidays of space, sojourns\n  Of suns and moons, and lock to earth\n  (_Why lock to earth?_)\n\n         *     *     *     *     *\n\n  That the Dead Face may flash across the seas\n  The cry of the new-born babe be heard around\n  A world. Ah me! and the click of lust\n  And the madness and the gladness and the ache\n  Of Dust, Dust!\n\n\nAN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.\n\nTHE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE\n\n  The mortal wires of the heart of the earth\n  I sing, melted and fused by men,\n  That the immortal fires of their souls should fling\n  To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,\n  And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense\n  The flame of the Creature's ken,\n  The flame of the glow of the face of God\n  Upon the face of men.\n\n  Wind-singing wires\n  Along their thousand airy aisles,\n  Feet of birds and songs of leaves,\n  Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.\n  Sea-singing wires\n  Along their thousand slimy miles,\n  Shadowy deeps,\n  Unsunned steeps,\n  Beating in their awful caves\n  To mouthing fish and bones\n  And weeds unfurled\n  Deserts of waves\n  The heart-beat of this upper world.\n  Infinite blue, infinite green,\n  Infinite glory of the ear\n  Ticking its passions through\n  Infinite fear,\n  Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks\n  The forever untrodden decks\n  Of Death,\n  Ever the seething wires\n  On the floors\n  Of the world,\n  Below the last\n  Locked fast\n  Water-darkened doors\n  Of the sun,\n  Lighting the awful signal fires\n  Of our speechless vast desires\n  On the mountains and the hills\n  Of the sea\n  Till the sandy-buried heights\n  And the sullen sunken vales\n  And fire-defying barrens of the deep\n  The hearth of souls shall be\n  Beacons of Thought,\n  And from the lurk of the shark\n  To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark\n  And where the farthest cloud-sail fills\n  Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping\n  The might and mad delight,\n  The hell-and-heaven groping\n  Of our little human wills.\n\n\nAN ODE TO THE WIRELESS\n\nTHE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH\nWOULD NOT WORK\n\n  Roofed in with fears,\n  Beneath its little strip of sky\n  That is blown about\n  In and out\n  Across my wavering strip of years--\n  Who am I\n  Whose singing scarce doth reach\n  The cloud-climbed hills,\n  To take upon my lips the speech\n  Of those whose voices Heaven fills\n  With splendor?\n\n  And yet--\n  I cannot quite forget\n  That in the underdawn of dreams\n  I have felt the faint surmise\n  Shining through the starry deep of my sleep\n  That I with God went singing once\n  Up and down with suns and storms\n  Through the phantom-pillared forms\n  And stately-silent naves\n  And thunder-dreaming caves\n  Of Heaven.\n\n  Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh\n  Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,\n  Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust\n  Hast thrust\n  Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,\n  Where are the deeds that needs must be,\n  The dreams, the high delights,\n  That I once more may hear my voice\n  From cloudy door to door rejoice--\n  May stretch the boundaries of love\n  Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears\n  To the faint-remembered glory of those years--\n  May lift my soul\n  And reach this Heaven of thine\n  With mine?\n  Where are the gleams?\n  Thou shalt tell me,\n  Shalt compel me.\n  The sometime glory shall return\n  I know.\n\n  The day shall be\n  When by wondering I shall learn\n  With vapor-fingers to discern\n  The music-hidden keys of skies--\n  Shall touch like thee\n  Until they answer me\n  The chords of the silent air\n  And strike the wild and slumber-music out\n  Dreaming there.\n  Above the hills of singing that I know\n  On the trackless, soundless path\n  That wonder hath\n  I shall go,\n  Beyond the street-cry of the poet,\n  The hurdy-gurdy singing\n  Of the throngs,\n  To the Throne of Silence,\n  Where the Doors\n  That guard the farthest faintest shores\n  Of Day\n  Swing their bars,\n  And shut the songs of heaven in\n  From all our dreaming-doing din,\n  Behind the stars.\n\n  There, at last,\n  The climbing and the singing passed,\n  And the cry,\n  My hushed and listening soul shall lie\n  At the feet of the place\n  Where the Singer sings\n  Who Hides His Face.\n\n\n\n\nVII\n\nTHE IDEA OF GREAT MEN\n\n  \"_I had a vision under a green hedge\n  A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear\n  Archangels rolling over the high mountains\n  Old Satan's empty skull._\"\n\n\nAs it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earth\nhas about been put into shape, now, to do things.\n\nThe Earth has never been seen before looking so trim and\nconvenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and looms\nand printing presses and railways have been supplied, wireless\ntelegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we\nhave put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it\nlooks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just\nbeing finished up, now, for a Great Author.\n\nIt is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a\nprosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the\nmodern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world\nfull of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the\nwrong size.\n\nThe modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical\nway, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its\npoets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it\nis quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its\nmachines and things making preparations for bigger ones.\n\nI have thought the great authors in every age were made by the\ngreatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice,\nhave felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes\nbeen called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds,\nby nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him\nin His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost any\none who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that\nJesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have\nmissed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at\nleast--ideas that nations would be born for.\n\nIt ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the\ngreat prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations\nand that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the\nwhole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a\nwhole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like\ngalleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no\nparticular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail\nacross an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth\nin him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.\nHe discovered America because he felt crowded.\n\nOne would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of\nimmortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic\nfact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness.\nWhen people have to be created and born on purpose, generation after\ngeneration of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of\nthem sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he\nspoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in\nthe habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several\ncenturies who gets them.\n\nI would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this\nearth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and\nlook expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet\nsomewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to\nhim. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and\nto listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks\nin it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been\nallowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could\nbe said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot\nbelieve that a world which for the first time in its history has at\nlast the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not\ngoing to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to\nsay to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full\naudience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would\nseem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half\nin light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having\na man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back,\neither, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or\nthought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this\npresent world has the verse of scripture about the next come\ntrue--\"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard.\" It is not conceivable that\nthere shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to\nthe first full house the planet has afforded.\n\nI have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the\npeoples flocking past me under the earth with their little\ncorner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to\nhimself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of\nyears. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can\ngreat men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into\nsingle nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a\nworld at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.\nThe whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids\nare out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great\nauthors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be\nhelped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to\nsay, with the first full house this planet has afforded.\n\nEven as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but\nspeak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations\nsit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven\nseas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the\nstage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play\nfollowing around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of\nsoul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want\nto write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction\napparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude.\nContinents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The\nwireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. \"How does a planet\napplaud?\" dreams the young author. \"With a faint flush of light?\" One\nwould like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one\nwas through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space.\n\nI wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or\nhad times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write\nin--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was\nthat came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around\nall of us now--I do like to mention it.\n\nWhen many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time\nto open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel\nsteamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why\nit was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and\nwatched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the\nfoam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the\ndrive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the\nlast secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I\nhave but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I\nknow I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep\nenough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and\nthe whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands\nof printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working\nsoftly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the\nword that was given to me to say.\n\nCan any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful,\nclairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the\nother side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and\nactions great in the world?\n\nSilently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great\ngathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are\nunanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting\ntogether at last for the first world-sized man, for the first\nworld-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really\ngetting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished,\nlived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One\nsees the sign on it\n\n            TO LET\n  TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.\n\n\n\n\nVIII\n\nTHE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP\n\n  \"_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me\n  Of some transcendent music I have heard;\n  No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,\n  No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.\n  But a glad strain of some still symphony\n  That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._\"\n\n\nHave you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle\nReader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying\nthere in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as\nyou stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in\nyour being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people\nin it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls\nsay it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in\nthe street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls,\nthat is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. \"O to\nknow--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second,\ntwenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to\nbe sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets\nand silent houses of it!\"\n\nI go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nights\nof the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, in\nThe Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And I\nhave said to you though I did not know it: \"Did you not call to me?\nDid you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you.\"\n\nI have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my soul.\nI have gone about and looked upon the face of the earth. I have\ndemanded of smoking villages sweeping past and of the mountains and of\nthe plains and of the middle of the sea: \"Where are those that belong\nto me? Will I ever travel near enough, far enough?\" I have gone up and\ndown the world--seen the countless men and women in it, standing on\neither side of their Abyss of Circumstance, beckoning and reaching\nout. I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, or old, casting\ntheir bread upon the waters, grasping at sunsets or afterglows,\nputting their souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem to be\nflickering their lives out like Marconi messages into a sort of\ninfinite, swallowing human space.\n\nAlways this same wild aimless sea of living. There does not seem to be\na geography for love. My soul answered me: \"Did you expect a world to\nbe indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. Blossoms and cyclones and\nsunshine and you and I--all blundering along together.\" \"Let every\nseed swell for itself,\" the Universe has said, in its first fine\ncareless rapture. God is merely having a good time. Why should I go up\nand down a universe crying through it, \"Where are those that belong to\nme?\" I have looked at the stars swung out at me and they have not\nanswered, and now when I look at the men, I have seemed to see them,\nevery man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands before him,\nhinged on emptiness. \"You are alone,\" the heart hath said. \"Get up and\nbe your own brother. The world is a great WHO CARES?\"\n\nBut when, in the middle of deep, helpless sleep, tossed on the wide\nwaters, I wake in a ship, feel it trembling all through out there with\nmy brother's care for me, I know that this is not true. \"Around\nsunsets, out through the great dark,\" I find myself saying, \"he has\nreached over and held me. Out here on this high hill of water, under\nthis low, touching sky, I sleep.\"\n\nSometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake silently, and feel gathered\naround. I wonder if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the button\nby my pillow. I listen to great cities tending me. I have found all\nthe earth paved, or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with my\nbrother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide from love. He has hired\noceans to do my errands. He has made the whole human race my\nhouse-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer joy, thinking of the\nstrange peoples where the morning is, running to and fro for me, down\nunder the dark. Next me, the great quiet throb of the engine--between\nme and infinite space--beating comfortably. I cannot help answering to\nit--this soft and mighty reaching out where I lie.\n\nMy thoughts follow along the great twin shafts my brother holds me\nwith. I wonder about them. I wish to do and share with them.\n\n  Were I a spirit I would go\n  Where the murmuring axles of the screws\n  Along their whirling aisles\n  Break through the hold,\n  Where they lift the awful shining thews\n  Of Thought,\n  Of Trade,\n  And strike the Sea\n  Till the scar of London lies\n  Miles and miles upon its breast\n  Out in the West.\n\nAs I lie and look out of my port-hole and watch the starlight stepping\nalong the sea I let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship I am\nin--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through my\nport-hole I seem to see other ships, ghosts of great cities--an ocean\nof them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, with\ntheir low hoarse whistles meeting one another, whispering to one\nanother under the stars.\n\n\"And they are all mine,\" I say, \"hastening gently.\"\n\nI lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole being float out upon the\nthought of it. The bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived a\ngreat life. It is as if I had been allowed to be a great man a minute.\nI feel rested down through to before I was born. The very stars, after\nit, seem rested over my head. I have gathered my universe about me. It\nis as if I had lain all still in my soul and some beautiful eternal\nsleep--a minute of it--had come to me and visited me. All men are my\nbrothers. Is not the world filled with hastening to me? What is there\nmy brother has not done for me? From the uttermost parts of the\nmorning, all things that are flow fresh and beautiful upon my flesh.\nHe has laid my will on the heavens. His machines are like the tides\nthat do not stop. They are a part of the vast antennae of the earth.\nThey have grown themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and dust, they\nare a part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek furs\nAlaska is as near as the next snowdrift. My brother has caused it to\nbe so. Everywhere is five cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon\nfrom Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knife\nfrom India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas.\nThousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my mouth, five or\nsix continents have made for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip\nof my tongue.\n\nAnd this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me,\nsolitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to take\nit in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one say\nthis thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done for\ncomradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it or\ndesired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? This\npaper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him for\nit? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of a\ngreat roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand he\nhas held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--of\nclouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea.\n\nAnd now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smoke\nforever.\n\nI have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some\nvast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this\nwhole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in\nsilence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in\nmy berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.\n\nWhen I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunny\nsilence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go by\nputting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer as\nit was at first, a mere train by itself to me,--a flash of parlor cars\nbetween a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings up\nbetween my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, it\nis the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creeping\nthrough the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring through\nthe sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world.\n\nIn the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it would\nbe hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share in\nspirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseen\npeoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen,\nand poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets and\nthe domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always the\nengineers,--I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world in\ntheir hands, who sweep up life ... long, narrow, little towns of\nsouls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights.\n\nIn this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would rather\nbe running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I\nhear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, the\ngreat human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the\nthunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there on\nthe roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, past\nglimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him\n(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on the\nswitch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth and\nsky.... The cities swoon before him ... swoon past him. Thundering\npast his own thunder, echoes dying away ... and now out in the great\nplain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, little\nblack miles.... Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder,\nthinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughs\nbitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men with\ntickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) he\nis not infallible. Once ... twice ... he might have ... he almost....\nThen suddenly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his teeth, he reaches\nout with his soul ... masters it, he strains himself up to his\ninfallibility again ... all those people there ... fathers, mothers,\nchildren, ... sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as the\nminister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on a\nSabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God\n... alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads.\n\nBut I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can see\nat a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)\nwhich make the big companions. It is a mere matter of getting\nacquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woven\nthrough with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors.\n\nI have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spirits\nof the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer with\nus, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked in\ncemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them with\nmighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence,\nwalk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in show\nwindows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into\nthem. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little\nlast whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre of\nsoul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the\ntrees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a\nmachine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not\nfull of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea,\nafter a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives were\nlike. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about each\nother.\n\nThere are days when it has been given to me to see the machines as\ninventors and prophets see them.\n\nOn these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. I\nhave seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the future\nthrough their fingers.\n\nOn these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoples\nsinging in the streets.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nAnd after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I have\ncome to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily\njoy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking around\none, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all this\nvast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and sounds\nand symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere,\nplaying upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well,\nwhen in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in order\naround about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived.\n\nThis great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before,\nalways sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive\nenergy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see the\nlook of the future in its face.\n\nAnd now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live\nforever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant\ngesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now,\nsolitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh,\nunknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn\ncurtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence\nand darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding,\nforgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And\nthen with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and\nwonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside\nliving his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep.\n\n\n\n\nBIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK\n\n\nPART ONE\n\nI. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient\nrim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies\nand songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century.\n\"If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill.\"\n\nII. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven\nto his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are\ngetting their living out of machines, or putting their living into\nthem, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down\nunder the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves\nhim standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except\nby shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of\ncommuning with his kind.\n\nIII. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul\nor the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little\nwhile--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A\nlittle while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to\nfeel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems\nat first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in\nmachines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the\nmachine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame\nthat minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a\nmachine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be\nanything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas.\nAll our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take\nthe stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be\nconnected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued\nexistence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for\nmodern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the\ncrowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,\nand for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.\n\nIV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary men\nwho know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them,\nthe inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about the\npoetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of\ninterpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead of\nbeing a literary or aesthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting\npeople to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.\n\nVI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of the\npeople, the tools of the nations.\n\nThe people are already coming to look upon the inventor under our\nmodern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we call\nliterature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing their\nliving with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as men\nare more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems the\nworld listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpret\nmachines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership until\nit does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in an\nage, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in a\nmachine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, is\nnot worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of the\nmachines that we have made could make a better religion than this.\n\n\nPART TWO\n\nTHE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES\n\nI. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must\nhave great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that the\nlanguage of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideas\nthat are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all language\nlooked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, is\nirrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of\nan archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people who\nhave tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a form\nof human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings.\n\nII. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of\neverything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show\noff. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not\nfeeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it,\nis not seeing it. The poetry is under water.\n\nIII. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for\npoetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for\nold-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch\nwindmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern\nman. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its\nlanguage is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in\nproportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modern\nlanguage, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machines\nthe more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric.\nElectricity is the modern man's prophet. It sums up his world. It has\nthe modern man's temperament--the passion of being invisible and\nirresistible.\n\nIV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of God.\nMost men to-day are worshipping God--at least in secret, not merely\nbecause of this great Machine that He has made, running softly above\nus--moonlight and starlight ... but because He has made a Machine that\ncan make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of the\nearth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron and\nsay \"Go ye now,--depths of the earth, heights of heaven--serve ye me!\nStones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the spirit that is in\nthee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!\"\n\nV. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thing\nmeans, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning the\nlanguage. The language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely\nknow whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I only\nknow that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of\nthe world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my\nsoul to it, and in some way--I know not how, while it sings to me, I\ngrow strong and glad.\n\n\nPART THREE\n\nTHE MACHINES AS POETS\n\nI. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul of\nman--of a whole world of men.\n\nIt has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of the\nindividual man who creates the Machine--the inventor, and the man who\nlives with the machine--the engineer.\n\nIt has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of God\nwho can make men who can make machines.\n\nIII. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man's\nsoul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have--the\nman's sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not\nmerely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it is\nmaking the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear the\nmachines, I hear Man saying, \"God and I.\"\n\nV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the infinity of\nman it expresses the two great immeasurable ideas of poetry and of the\nimagination and of the soul in all ages--the two forms of\ninfinity--the liberty and the unity of man.\n\nThe substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.\n\nA beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the\nnature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.\n\nMachinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately\nexpressed.\n\n\nPART FOUR\n\nTHE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES\n\nThe ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched in\nchapters as follows:\n\nI. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man.\n\nIII. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment.\n\nIV. The idea of immortality.\n\nV. The idea of God.\n\nVI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible.\n\nVII. The practical idea of invoking great men.\n\nVIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nNote.--The present volume is the first of a series which had their\nbeginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago,\nanswering or trying to answer the question, \"Can a machine age have a\nsoul?\" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as it\nstands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phases\nand implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in our\nmodern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, are\nbeing considered in a series of three volumes called:\n\nI. The Voice of the Machines.\n\nII. Machines and Millionaires.\n\nIII. Machines and Crowds.\n\n\n\n\nBY THE SAME AUTHOR\n\n\nABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. _$1.00._ \"I have read it twice and\nenjoyed it the second time even more than the first.\"--_Oliver Wendell\nHolmes._\n\n\"I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made me\nas hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full of\nlaughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us I\ndo not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as I\nwould a note--right across the face and present it for payment in any\nman's library.\"--_Robert J. Burdette._\n\n\nTHE CHILD AND THE BOOK. _$.75._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) \"I must\nexpress with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm I have\nfelt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the most\nbrilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were\nlaid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form,\nand all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merely\na thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive....\n\n\"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. It\nis the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makes\nme believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us in\nauthorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can\nconceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be the\ndate of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long\nbeen scanning the horizon.\"--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY, in _Boston\nTranscript_.\n\n\nTHE LOST ART OF READING. _$1.00._ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons._) \"It is a\nreal pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books of\nthe day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us having\nread it will keep it near us.\"--_Life_.\n\n\"Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what some\npeople are a little alarmed even to think.\"--_Springfield Republican_.\n\n\"You get right in between the covers and live.\"--_Denver Post_.\n\n\nTHE SHADOW CHRIST. _$1.25._ (_The Century Co._) \"Let me be one of the\nfirst to recognize in this book what every man who reads it\nthoughtfully will feel. Heaps of the books that have been written\nabout the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust. They\nare the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a man appears\nwho makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if\nnecessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be a full,\nprecise treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision.\nTheology expressed in a lyric. Criticism condensed into an\nepigram.\"--DR. HENRY VAN DYKE, in _The Book Buyer_.\n\n\"The author's name--Gerald Stanley Lee--has been hitherto unknown to\nus in England, but the book he has here offered to the world indicates\nthat he has that in him which will soon make it familiar.\"--_The\nChristian World_ (London).\n\n\nMOUNT TOM. AN ALL OUTDOORS MAGAZINE, devoted to rest and worship, and\nto a little look-off on the world.\n\nEdited by Mr. LEE. Every other month. 12 copies, $1.00.\n\n\nTHE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. _$1.25._ (_Mt. Tom Press._)\n\n\n  Any of the above mailed postpaid ordered direct from\n       The Mount Tom Press, Northampton, Mass.","title":"The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":38096}