PART FOUR

IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES

I

THE IDEA OF INCARNATION

"_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,

And found it not--but many things beside;

Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.

And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.

Then wandering upward through the solid earth

With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,

I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,

And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie

Safe in the dust or ride along the sky--

Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'"

The grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hop

for his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watching

him--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loom

up on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one of

the great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumps

forty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as well

as any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make

two hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course,

that the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolley

to do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use things

outside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everything

outside him serve him as if he had it on his own body--uses a whole

universe every day without the trouble of always having to carry it

around with him. He gets his will out of the ground and even out of

the air. He lays hold of the universe and makes arms and legs out of

it. If he wants at any time, for any reason, more body than he was

made with, he has his soul reach out over or around the planet a

little farther and draw it in for him.

The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not differ from the man in

that he has a soul and body both, but his soul and body seem to be

perfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably the

best (and the worst) that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if he

has one, that it is in his legs--that he really has his wits about

him.

Looked at superficially, or from the point of view of the next hop, it

can hardly be denied that the body the human soul has been fitted out

with is a rather inferior affair. From the point of view of any

respectable or ordinarily well-equipped animal the human body--the one

accorded to the average human being in the great show of

creation--almost looks sometimes as if God really must have made it as

a kind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on the

rest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very moment

he was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the

animals man should be immortal--and had let it go at that. With the

exception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra

fold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the most

unexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedingly

unlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to

any one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with our hands and

feet, any animal on earth could tell us, are things we do not do as

well as men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as well as we did

when we were born. Our very babies are our superiors.

The only defence we are able to make when we are arraigned before the

bar of creation, seems to be, that while some of the powers we have

exhibited have been very obviously lost, we have gained some very fine

new invisible ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all,--our

nerves, for instance,--the mentalized condition of our organs. And

then, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter.

When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the

judgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking

at us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion,

we hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in

us. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well

our bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean

is, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large,

or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well

arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a

superior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to

appreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can

deny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale,

little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on

this earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we

can. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before

The Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all

summer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost

always under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it

likes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in

thousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we

can well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughter

at us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishes

peeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still,

underworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling,

in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, it

is true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on the

planet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of staying

carefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much by

ourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise,

called civilization, we keep each other in countenance after a

fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when we

stop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the others

see us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to,

and have it done with.

It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up and

down the world,--looking upon the man's body,--the little funny one

that he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking upon

the one that he really has. When one considers what a man actually

does, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he

has been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of

central nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of

infinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, of

Nothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There

is something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out and

incomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say,

but not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently,

is a kind of light there is in it.

But the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same light

that reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames upon

heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it,

I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and

worshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great waters

and the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for a

body, which the man has.

I go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash of

black and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death,

disgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills,

and the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn the

papers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out through

the dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and the

Philippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices of

the nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the

man. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of the

man meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watched

them on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power,

ninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, ... thundering aisles of

souls ... on into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of the

man.

And when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently across

heaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of the

man is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, over

it, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look,

since I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon the countenance

of the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or resting

in the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reaches

out around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars and

beyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, that

shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wireless

telegraph and steel, or know the sound of its going? Now, when I see

it, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. Like a low thunder it

reaches around the crust of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle

body (oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over the hill of the

sea, soft and stately as the walking of the clouds in the upper air.

Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always

coming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the

dark, "And I am here, too!"

Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel

Himself?

And so it has come to pass, this vision I have seen with my own

eyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body,

going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and Space.

Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a

dream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his

hand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the

whole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist,

the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of

the ships.

Between the seas and skies

The Shuttle flies

Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep,

Thousand-sailed,

Half in waking, half in sleep.

Glistening calms and shouting gales

Water-gold and green,

And many a heavenly-minded blue

It thrusts and shudders through,

Past my starlight,

Past the glow of suns I know,

Weaving fates,

Loves and hates

In the Sea--

The stately Shuttle

To and fro,

Mast by mast,

Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.

Flights of Days and Nights

Flies fast.

It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the

modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and

holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that

machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging

for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded

into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a

great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and

the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities,

making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and

rolling out the roads of continents.

If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet

there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against

us--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have

almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man

wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely

hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for

him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man

and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He

ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he

lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him,

"Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?"

The trains like spirits flock to him.

There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my

pocket it sings.

In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.

I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale

and small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to

tell the truth.

II

THE IDEA OF SIZE

Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount

Tom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in

machinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely

being polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain,

not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no

place for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the

trouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.

Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening

particularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and

the hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and

symbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity

and Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets

worse than other people's genealogies.

But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just

over the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations

as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they

will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It

would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be

agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious

matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of

course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the

risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next

few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.

* * * * *

Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a

regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I

do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must

say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I

would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very

small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are

more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering

generality.

I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at

least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking

down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever

it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for

me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very

large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling,

every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very

conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I

like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are not

the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always

at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a

world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds

I cannot see."

The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on

is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What I

really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small

or large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken

iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of

them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.

I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the

work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be

done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the

globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much

of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it,

every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing

we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a

young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred

more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do

up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or

stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it

does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or

how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were

all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so

often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it

out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was

mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are

thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be

old-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very

big earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spider

that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be

ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The

universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a

little compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a

pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a

single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever

been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little

wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for

thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.

III

THE IDEA OF LIBERTY

Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was

getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in

and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day

looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.

I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a

mile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see

that I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings

were hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not

get myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look at

it impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the

universe, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the

sunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe

before. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt

that history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.

I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it

and got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my

friends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other

uncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw

it, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I

discovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum

for all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it was

going to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not

get myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun

peeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flustered

me--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I

found myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what

it would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to

be. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably

be too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.

I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelée last summer. I

resented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.

The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a

comparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only

afforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It

could not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was

underneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. The

feeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could

not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken

body and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been

asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted

to or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground

underneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living

every day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being

asked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and

found institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and

ruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in space to burn itself

up--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or

bit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time

and pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to

the dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "You

might as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelée in the

face," I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, set

down helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something

all fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust

or geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any

place after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and

all ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful

ceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is

seething beneath your feet."

It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of

this earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it,

without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round

swindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with

all of us on it, laughing at us.

I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelée broke out. I

went wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to

get warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all

subjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It

was a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had

let through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground

simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured

the earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.

I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming

as the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the

fires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss

of outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and

gradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both,

both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would

have to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race

was going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little

ones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just

outside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all in

a swirl of snowdrifts.

I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I

have always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human

interest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if

the earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract

with the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off

all of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a

comparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far

out at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual

capacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was

something distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if

we had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this

injured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I

could not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out

of the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing

afar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.

Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was

standing as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or

flowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I

defied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to

keep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me,

of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if

the soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness

would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an

inventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of

the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be

maltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had

he not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet,

flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homes

out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of

the mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.

It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was

when it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead

of having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by

apparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great

nations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All

the young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the ends

or tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still

at work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to

have things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any

afternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and

playing duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.

It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at

any given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we

like.

I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just

what the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would

make some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if

the sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged

something, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely

that the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries

for nothing. The things they have done against him have been the

making of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in

the earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him

and left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew

what to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has

had his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is

only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think

of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world

with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can

only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he

makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like

this are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath

out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with

poisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers,

and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with

a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in

the great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night

like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a

breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he

is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands

of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without

the copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought

thousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need not

fear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an

action of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste

of heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man

like this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms

him or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shall

be as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire

and wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and

Nothing are his servants.

The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics

saying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off

neglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision

of all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in

furs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep

warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats

on giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.

It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:

"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.

Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At

all events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet

he's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful

impossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking

for."

A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its

street pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,

which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which

has its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is

over the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights

railway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping

them, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a

race like this could not find some way at least of managing its own

planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming

it, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed

down in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the

waves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden

almost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at

herself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things

nowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock

company or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that a

thousand years from now we will not have found some other use for

moonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be

manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating

houses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from

door to door in cases and bottles.

First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with

a planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it,

outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea

that we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be

more likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we

ought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be

much, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our

continents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from

the center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what

science is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick

out something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We

manufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet

as we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things,

we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one

wants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and

mechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected

enough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwest

has just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the

force of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or

flag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over

the edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of

gravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a

glance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or

so (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.),

everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure

would gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When

completed it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space

(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and

more). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a

connection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one

would care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that

would always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up all

the raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on the

others. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station to

the planets in general that would be useful. They would know what we

want, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where we

could.

All this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult to

tell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talking

of a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is no

telling about him--that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going

son of God and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on,

with quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes are

prophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, Gentle

Reader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground is

still beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us notice

stars more.

In the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affair

like this one single planet, need not worry us much.

I still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeing

it--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same

old green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sun

does. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and

of love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man,

running about and strutting, flying through space on it, all his

interests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning to

worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds or

with this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand or

deck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was.

Long after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthest

breath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises around

you, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your round

white cloud, rowing faithfully through space!

IV

THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY

If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around

to my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not

at all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I

should do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it was

for. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want

to settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being

conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first

thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it

might be overdoing things a little.

I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men

and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I

know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be

lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in

immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I

were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting

out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that

wanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier

and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how

long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure

in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and

had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest

preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is

only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have

the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality

I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this

very moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United

States of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I

feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to

an infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or praying

to Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging

Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it

sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to

His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes,

and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal

throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his

sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a

petition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel

as if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.

I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was

asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great

blackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed

out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of

light--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through

Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, "Now I will try to realize

Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me...." Ties

flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping

ghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The

long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops

(and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential,

semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence,

they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up

every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and

further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.

The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self,

nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the

long monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around

and beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to

pick out with one's soul from Darkness. "Here am I," I said as the

roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed

through the blackness. "Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of

glimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my

feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through

deserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and

hold me."

No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea

and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but

it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of

appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High

Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my

own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying

that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or

horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain

may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must

confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's

immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in

his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is

his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and

his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the

space there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is

living or staying, the universe is his real address.

I have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide night

and looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the

swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my

board in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered

it in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of

it--the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through me

and chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, "Where art thou?" I

looked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself and

upon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters.

A thousand breaths we lie

Shrouded limbs and faces

Horizontal

Packed in cases

In our named and numbered places,

Catalogued for sleep,

Trembling through the Godlight

Below, above,

Deep to Deep.

How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to

have time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about

another--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if

it were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters out

for having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--is

a problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a

grave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in

another world would ever really pay some people for the time they have

wasted in this one, worrying about it.

Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as

unimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I am

a parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist of

worlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am

not living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe

... with a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. The

whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it.

I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--to

the uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit,

would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night

they reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with

dreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at

least as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I

care little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across

my soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other

when I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related

life, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or

not,--takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of

space or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and

petering along over a long, narrow row of years?

Thousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, and

through the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked and

printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not

know that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam

I say, "There is my omnipresence." My being is busy out in the

universe having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the

world are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to

keep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I

lay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether

I so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof

for me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.

II

I have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea of

which seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who are

worthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fashioned

method that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practical

purposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us,--are

already being woven in us. The author does not say it in so many

words, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual or

subtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we live

as we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one.

I can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to take

the time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infinite

experiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about another

world.

It is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in an

infinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managed

than one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do,

is to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this.

If the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one,

then so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems a

little abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and why

not leave it to God to work it out? He doesn't have to neglect

anything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do it

anyway.

I have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of a

theory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly

still. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me,

through all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deep

grass. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city in

the grass--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. I

know their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. And

when I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds,

tides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possess

them. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions of

ages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sun

and the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Who

can shut me out from anybody's sunrise?

"Oh, tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire;

One morn is in the mighty heaven

And one in my desire."

I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I can

telegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is no

longer a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, conducting a big

foolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helpless

cities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it out

from over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is my

sky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has a

monopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I have

made an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky.

The soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares.

Men go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift my

hands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the hands

of my hands I work with it. I say "I and the sky." I say "I and the

Earth." We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached over

with the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--a

kind of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfully

out in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one of

his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborly

thought. God's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man have

signaled each other.

V

THE IDEA OF GOD

My study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where I

put it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of

it--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand

guard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;

nearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down

in my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming

gently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I would

not believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in which Bottle?" I have groped

for one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping

for a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of

ancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events

of the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed

on the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make

out to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can.

I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that

when the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in

my mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things,

pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow

and reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells me

cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he

has found Him, I wonder if he has.

The very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a world

alive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey

to search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would find

would be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his

God in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.

It does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain,

rudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the very

essence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for,

in giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences.

I suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with the

scientist is not that he is material, but that he is not material

enough,--he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot

believe for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacle

of matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed

thing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--this

spectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in a

bottle for instance--a bottle which he places absolutely by itself,

would be able to find one if he tried. It seems to me that it is by

letting one's self have one's infinite--one's infinitely related

experiences, and not by cutting them off that one comes to know a God.

To find a God who is everywhere one must at least spend a part of

one's time in being everywhere one's self--in relating one's knowledge

to all knowledge.

There are various undergirding arguments and reasons, but the only way

that I really know there is an infinite God is because I am

infinite--in a small way--myself. Even the matter that has come into

the world connected with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. If

my soul, like some dim pale light left burning within me, were merely

to creep to the boundaries of its own body, it would know there was a

God. The very flesh I live with every day is infinite flesh. From the

furthest rumors of men and women, the furthest edge of time and space

my soul has gathered dust to itself. I carry a temple about with me.

If I could do no better, and if there were need, I am my own

cathedral. I worship when I breathe. I bow down before the tick of my

pulse. I chant to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of my

fingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man ask

me to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go

out into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure there

is a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the

God within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of the

burning dust warmed me before the stars--made a hearth for my soul

before them? I am at home with them. I sit daily before worlds as at

my own fireside.

I suppose there is something intolerant and impatient and a little

heartless about an optimist--especially the kind of optimism that is

based upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the structure of the

world. There is such a thing, I suppose, with some of us, as having a

kind of devilish pride in faith, as one would say to ordinary mortals

and creepers and considerers and arguers "Oh now just see me believe!"

We are like boys taking turns jumping in the Great Vacant Lot, seeing

which can believe the furthest. We need to be reminded that a man

cannot simply bring a little brag to God, about His world, and make a

religion out of it. I do not doubt in the least, as a matter of

theory, that I have the wrong spirit--sometimes--toward the scientific

man who lives around the corner of my mind. It seems to me he is

always suggesting important-looking unimportant things. I have days of

sympathizing with him, of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack

up upon my shoulders and strapping it there. But before I know it I'm

off. I throw it away or melt it down into a tablet or something--put

it in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God.

And the worst of it is, I think He intended me to. I think He intended

me to know and to keep knowing daily what He has done for me and is

doing now, out in the universe, and what He has made me to do. I also

am a God. From the first time I saw the sun I have been one daily. I

have performed daily all the homelier miracles and all the common

functions of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into my being. Out

of the air of heaven I have made flesh. I have taken earth from the

earth and burned it within me and made it into prayers and into songs.

I have said to my soul "To eat is to sing." I worship all over. I am

my own sacrament. I lay before God nights of sleep, and the delight

and wonder of the flesh I render back to Him again, daily, as an

offering in His sight.

And what is true of my literal body--of the joy of my hands and my

feet, is still more true of the hands of my hands.

When I wake in the night and send forth my thought upon the darkness,

track out my own infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky

reaching around me, all telegraphed through with thought, and floored

with steel, I may have to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes),

but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the door of heaven if

there is a heaven or needs to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory

of the other worlds, has not science itself told me that they are a

part of me and I a part of them? Nothing is that would not be

different without something else. My thoughts are ticking through the

clouds, and the great sun itself is creeping through me daily down in

my bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a hundred seas. I turn

over in my sleep at midnight and lay my hand on the noon. And when I

have slept and walk forth in the morning, the stars flow in my veins.

Why should a man dare to whine? "Whine not at me!" I have said to man

my brother. If you cannot sing to me do not interrupt me.

Let him sing to me

Who sees the watching of the stars above the day,

Who hears the singing of the sunrise

On its way

Through all the night.

Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms,

Whose soul has roamed

Infinite-homed

Through tents of Space,

His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms

All wonder.

Let him sing to me

Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover

Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds

The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife,

The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds,

Of His Own Life.

VI

THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE

_AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN_

Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,

Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words

In the music-haunted houses of the birds,

Singers with the thrushes and pewees

In the glimmer-lighted roofs

Of the trees--

Unhand my soul!

Buds with singing in their hearts,

Birds with blooms upon their wings,

All the wandering whispers of delight,

The near familiar things;

Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,

Sounds of going in the grain

Shall not bind me to thy singing

When the sky with God is ringing

For the Joy of the Rain.

Sea and star and hill and thunder,

Dawn and sunset, noon and night,

All the vast processional of the wonder

Where the worlds are,

Where my soul is,

Where the shining tracks are

For the spirit's flight--

Lift thine eyes to these

From the haunts of dewdrops,

Hollows of the flowers,

Caves of bees

That sing like thee,

Only in their bowers;

From the stately growing cities

Of the little blowing leaves,

To the infinite windless eaves

Of the stars;

From the dainty music of the ground,

The dim innumerable sound

Of the Mighty Sun

Creeping in the grass,

Softest stir of His feet

(Where they go

Far and slow

On their immemorial beat

Of buds and seeds

And all the gentle and holy needs

Of flowers),

To the old eternal round

Of the Going of His Might,

Above the confines of the dark,

Odors and winds and showers,

Day and night,

Above the dream of death and birth

Flickering East and West,

Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth--

Where He wheels

And soars

And plays

In illimitable light,

Sends the singing stars upon their ways

And on each and every world

When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep

Is furled--

Pours the Days.

* * * * *

The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric

cars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home to

supper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The

Thing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been

found by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turned

on--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels,

and run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out in

the darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I

had seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked

on in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more

surprised if I had met a star walking in the street.

In my deepest dream

I heard the Song

Running in my sleep

Through the lowest caves of Being

Down below

Where no sound is, sun is,

Hearing, seeing

That men know.

There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars

moving, that made it all seem very old.

_An Ode to the Lightning._

Before the first new dust of dream God took

For making man and hope and love and graves

Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods

Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow

Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,

The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague

To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept

From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff

That wove the worlds,

Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,

While still, hinged on nothing,

Dim and shapeless Things

And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings

Floated and waited.

Before the winds had breathed the breath of life

Or blown from wastes of Space

To Earth's creating place,

The souls of seeds

And ghosts of old dead stars,

The Lightning Spirit willed

Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.

--Primal fire of all desire

That leaps from men to men,

Brother of Suns

And all the Glorious Ones

That circle skies,

He flashed to these

The night that brought the birth,

The vision of the place

And raised his awful face

To all their glittering crowds,

And cried from where It lay

--A tiny ball of fire and clay

In swaddling clothes of clouds,

"Behold the Earth!"

* * * * *

* * * * *

Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer

Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!

Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.

Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven

And heaven and Heaven's heaven. Oh thou whose play

Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_)

--And call from holidays of space, sojourns

Of suns and moons, and lock to earth

(_Why lock to earth?_)

* * * * *

That the Dead Face may flash across the seas

The cry of the new-born babe be heard around

A world. Ah me! and the click of lust

And the madness and the gladness and the ache

Of Dust, Dust!

AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.

THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE

The mortal wires of the heart of the earth

I sing, melted and fused by men,

That the immortal fires of their souls should fling

To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,

And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense

The flame of the Creature's ken,

The flame of the glow of the face of God

Upon the face of men.

Wind-singing wires

Along their thousand airy aisles,

Feet of birds and songs of leaves,

Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.

Sea-singing wires

Along their thousand slimy miles,

Shadowy deeps,

Unsunned steeps,

Beating in their awful caves

To mouthing fish and bones

And weeds unfurled

Deserts of waves

The heart-beat of this upper world.

Infinite blue, infinite green,

Infinite glory of the ear

Ticking its passions through

Infinite fear,

Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks

The forever untrodden decks

Of Death,

Ever the seething wires

On the floors

Of the world,

Below the last

Locked fast

Water-darkened doors

Of the sun,

Lighting the awful signal fires

Of our speechless vast desires

On the mountains and the hills

Of the sea

Till the sandy-buried heights

And the sullen sunken vales

And fire-defying barrens of the deep

The hearth of souls shall be

Beacons of Thought,

And from the lurk of the shark

To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark

And where the farthest cloud-sail fills

Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping

The might and mad delight,

The hell-and-heaven groping

Of our little human wills.

AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS

THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH

WOULD NOT WORK

Roofed in with fears,

Beneath its little strip of sky

That is blown about

In and out

Across my wavering strip of years--

Who am I

Whose singing scarce doth reach

The cloud-climbed hills,

To take upon my lips the speech

Of those whose voices Heaven fills

With splendor?

And yet--

I cannot quite forget

That in the underdawn of dreams

I have felt the faint surmise

Shining through the starry deep of my sleep

That I with God went singing once

Up and down with suns and storms

Through the phantom-pillared forms

And stately-silent naves

And thunder-dreaming caves

Of Heaven.

Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh

Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,

Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust

Hast thrust

Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,

Where are the deeds that needs must be,

The dreams, the high delights,

That I once more may hear my voice

From cloudy door to door rejoice--

May stretch the boundaries of love

Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears

To the faint-remembered glory of those years--

May lift my soul

And reach this Heaven of thine

With mine?

Where are the gleams?

Thou shalt tell me,

Shalt compel me.

The sometime glory shall return

I know.

The day shall be

When by wondering I shall learn

With vapor-fingers to discern

The music-hidden keys of skies--

Shall touch like thee

Until they answer me

The chords of the silent air

And strike the wild and slumber-music out

Dreaming there.

Above the hills of singing that I know

On the trackless, soundless path

That wonder hath

I shall go,

Beyond the street-cry of the poet,

The hurdy-gurdy singing

Of the throngs,

To the Throne of Silence,

Where the Doors

That guard the farthest faintest shores

Of Day

Swing their bars,

And shut the songs of heaven in

From all our dreaming-doing din,

Behind the stars.

There, at last,

The climbing and the singing passed,

And the cry,

My hushed and listening soul shall lie

At the feet of the place

Where the Singer sings

Who Hides His Face.

VII

THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN

"_I had a vision under a green hedge

A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear

Archangels rolling over the high mountains

Old Satan's empty skull._"

As it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earth

has about been put into shape, now, to do things.

The Earth has never been seen before looking so trim and

convenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and looms

and printing presses and railways have been supplied, wireless

telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we

have put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it

looks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just

being finished up, now, for a Great Author.

It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a

prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the

modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world

full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the

wrong size.

The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical

way, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its

poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it

is quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its

machines and things making preparations for bigger ones.

I have thought the great authors in every age were made by the

greatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice,

have felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes

been called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds,

by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him

in His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost any

one who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that

Jesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have

missed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at

least--ideas that nations would be born for.

It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the

great prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations

and that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the

whole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a

whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like

galleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no

particular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail

across an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth

in him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.

He discovered America because he felt crowded.

One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of

immortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic

fact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness.

When people have to be created and born on purpose, generation after

generation of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of

them sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he

spoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in

the habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several

centuries who gets them.

I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this

earth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and

look expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet

somewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to

him. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and

to listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks

in it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been

allowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could

be said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot

believe that a world which for the first time in its history has at

last the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not

going to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to

say to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full

audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would

seem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half

in light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having

a man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back,

either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or

thought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this

present world has the verse of scripture about the next come

true--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." It is not conceivable that

there shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to

the first full house the planet has afforded.

I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the

peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little

corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to

himself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of

years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can

great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into

single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a

world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.

The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids

are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great

authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be

helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to

say, with the first full house this planet has afforded.

Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but

speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations

sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven

seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the

stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play

following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of

soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want

to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction

apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude.

Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The

wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet

applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One

would like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one

was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space.

I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or

had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write

in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was

that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around

all of us now--I do like to mention it.

When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time

to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel

steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why

it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and

watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the

foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the

drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the

last secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I

have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I

know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep

enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and

the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands

of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working

softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the

word that was given to me to say.

Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful,

clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the

other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and

actions great in the world?

Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great

gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are

unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting

together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first

world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really

getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished,

lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One

sees the sign on it

TO LET

TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.

VIII

THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP

"_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me

Of some transcendent music I have heard;

No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,

No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.

But a glad strain of some still symphony

That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._"

Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle

Reader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying

there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as

you stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in

your being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people

in it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls

say it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in

the street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls,

that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O to

know--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second,

twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to

be sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets

and silent houses of it!"

I go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nights

of the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, in

The Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And I

have said to you though I did not know it: "Did you not call to me?

Did you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you."

I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my soul.

I have gone about and looked upon the face of the earth. I have

demanded of smoking villages sweeping past and of the mountains and of

the plains and of the middle of the sea: "Where are those that belong

to me? Will I ever travel near enough, far enough?" I have gone up and

down the world--seen the countless men and women in it, standing on

either side of their Abyss of Circumstance, beckoning and reaching

out. I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, or old, casting

their bread upon the waters, grasping at sunsets or afterglows,

putting their souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem to be

flickering their lives out like Marconi messages into a sort of

infinite, swallowing human space.

Always this same wild aimless sea of living. There does not seem to be

a geography for love. My soul answered me: "Did you expect a world to

be indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. Blossoms and cyclones and

sunshine and you and I--all blundering along together." "Let every

seed swell for itself," the Universe has said, in its first fine

careless rapture. God is merely having a good time. Why should I go up

and down a universe crying through it, "Where are those that belong to

me?" I have looked at the stars swung out at me and they have not

answered, and now when I look at the men, I have seemed to see them,

every man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands before him,

hinged on emptiness. "You are alone," the heart hath said. "Get up and

be your own brother. The world is a great WHO CARES?"

But when, in the middle of deep, helpless sleep, tossed on the wide

waters, I wake in a ship, feel it trembling all through out there with

my brother's care for me, I know that this is not true. "Around

sunsets, out through the great dark," I find myself saying, "he has

reached over and held me. Out here on this high hill of water, under

this low, touching sky, I sleep."

Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake silently, and feel gathered

around. I wonder if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the button

by my pillow. I listen to great cities tending me. I have found all

the earth paved, or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with my

brother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide from love. He has hired

oceans to do my errands. He has made the whole human race my

house-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer joy, thinking of the

strange peoples where the morning is, running to and fro for me, down

under the dark. Next me, the great quiet throb of the engine--between

me and infinite space--beating comfortably. I cannot help answering to

it--this soft and mighty reaching out where I lie.

My thoughts follow along the great twin shafts my brother holds me

with. I wonder about them. I wish to do and share with them.

Were I a spirit I would go

Where the murmuring axles of the screws

Along their whirling aisles

Break through the hold,

Where they lift the awful shining thews

Of Thought,

Of Trade,

And strike the Sea

Till the scar of London lies

Miles and miles upon its breast

Out in the West.

As I lie and look out of my port-hole and watch the starlight stepping

along the sea I let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship I am

in--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through my

port-hole I seem to see other ships, ghosts of great cities--an ocean

of them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, with

their low hoarse whistles meeting one another, whispering to one

another under the stars.

"And they are all mine," I say, "hastening gently."

I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole being float out upon the

thought of it. The bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived a

great life. It is as if I had been allowed to be a great man a minute.

I feel rested down through to before I was born. The very stars, after

it, seem rested over my head. I have gathered my universe about me. It

is as if I had lain all still in my soul and some beautiful eternal

sleep--a minute of it--had come to me and visited me. All men are my

brothers. Is not the world filled with hastening to me? What is there

my brother has not done for me? From the uttermost parts of the

morning, all things that are flow fresh and beautiful upon my flesh.

He has laid my will on the heavens. His machines are like the tides

that do not stop. They are a part of the vast antennæ of the earth.

They have grown themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and dust, they

are a part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek furs

Alaska is as near as the next snowdrift. My brother has caused it to

be so. Everywhere is five cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon

from Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knife

from India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas.

Thousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my mouth, five or

six continents have made for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip

of my tongue.

And this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me,

solitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to take

it in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one say

this thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done for

comradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it or

desired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? This

paper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him for

it? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of a

great roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand he

has held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--of

clouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea.

And now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smoke

forever.

I have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some

vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this

whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in

silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in

my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.

When I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunny

silence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go by

putting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer as

it was at first, a mere train by itself to me,--a flash of parlor cars

between a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings up

between my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, it

is the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creeping

through the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring through

the sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world.

In the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it would

be hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share in

spirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseen

peoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen,

and poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets and

the domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always the

engineers,--I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world in

their hands, who sweep up life ... long, narrow, little towns of

souls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights.

In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would rather

be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I

hear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, the

great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the

thunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there on

the roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, past

glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him

(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on the

switch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth and

sky.... The cities swoon before him ... swoon past him. Thundering

past his own thunder, echoes dying away ... and now out in the great

plain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, little

black miles.... Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder,

thinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughs

bitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men with

tickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) he

is not infallible. Once ... twice ... he might have ... he almost....

Then suddenly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his teeth, he reaches

out with his soul ... masters it, he strains himself up to his

infallibility again ... all those people there ... fathers, mothers,

children, ... sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as the

minister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on a

Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God

... alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads.

But I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can see

at a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)

which make the big companions. It is a mere matter of getting

acquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woven

through with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors.

I have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spirits

of the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer with

us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked in

cemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them with

mighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence,

walk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in show

windows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into

them. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little

last whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre of

soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the

trees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a

machine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not

full of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea,

after a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives were

like. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about each

other.

There are days when it has been given to me to see the machines as

inventors and prophets see them.

On these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. I

have seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the future

through their fingers.

On these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoples

singing in the streets.

* * * * *

And after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I have

come to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily

joy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking around

one, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all this

vast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and sounds

and symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere,

playing upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well,

when in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in order

around about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived.

This great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before,

always sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive

energy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see the

look of the future in its face.

And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live

forever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant

gesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now,

solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh,

unknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn

curtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence

and darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding,

forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And

then with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and

wonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside

living his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep.

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK

PART ONE

I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient

rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies

and songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century.

"If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill."

II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven

to his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are

getting their living out of machines, or putting their living into

them, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down

under the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves

him standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except

by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of

communing with his kind.

III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul

or the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little

while--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A

little while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to

feel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems

at first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in

machines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the

machine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame

that minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a

machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be

anything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas.

All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take

the stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be

connected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued

existence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for

modern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the

crowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,

and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.

IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary men

who know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them,

the inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about the

poetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of

interpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead of

being a literary or æsthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting

people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.

VI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of the

people, the tools of the nations.

The people are already coming to look upon the inventor under our

modern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we call

literature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing their

living with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as men

are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems the

world listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpret

machines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership until

it does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in an

age, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in a

machine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, is

not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of the

machines that we have made could make a better religion than this.

PART TWO

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES

I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must

have great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that the

language of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideas

that are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all language

looked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, is

irrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of

an archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people who

have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a form

of human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings.

II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of

everything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show

off. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not

feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it,

is not seeing it. The poetry is under water.

III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for

poetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for

old-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch

windmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern

man. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its

language is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in

proportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modern

language, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machines

the more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric.

Electricity is the modern man's prophet. It sums up his world. It has

the modern man's temperament--the passion of being invisible and

irresistible.

IV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of God.

Most men to-day are worshipping God--at least in secret, not merely

because of this great Machine that He has made, running softly above

us--moonlight and starlight ... but because He has made a Machine that

can make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of the

earth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron and

say "Go ye now,--depths of the earth, heights of heaven--serve ye me!

Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the spirit that is in

thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!"

V. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thing

means, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning the

language. The language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely

know whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I only

know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of

the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my

soul to it, and in some way--I know not how, while it sings to me, I

grow strong and glad.

PART THREE

THE MACHINES AS POETS

I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul of

man--of a whole world of men.

It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of the

individual man who creates the Machine--the inventor, and the man who

lives with the machine--the engineer.

It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of God

who can make men who can make machines.

III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man's

soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have--the

man's sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not

merely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it is

making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear the

machines, I hear Man saying, "God and I."

V. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the infinity of

man it expresses the two great immeasurable ideas of poetry and of the

imagination and of the soul in all ages--the two forms of

infinity--the liberty and the unity of man.

The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.

A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the

nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.

Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately

expressed.

PART FOUR

THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES

The ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched in

chapters as follows:

I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man.

III. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment.

IV. The idea of immortality.

V. The idea of God.

VI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible.

VII. The practical idea of invoking great men.

VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship.

* * * * *

Note.--The present volume is the first of a series which had their

beginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago,

answering or trying to answer the question, "Can a machine age have a

soul?" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as it

stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phases

and implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in our

modern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, are

being considered in a series of three volumes called:

I. The Voice of the Machines.

II. Machines and Millionaires.

III. Machines and Crowds.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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End of Project Gutenberg's The Voice of the Machines, by Gerald Stanley Lee