Chapter VI: Part FOUR: Ideas Behind the Machines (2)

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