with this man for not being
a seer, or to feel superior to him for not being an idealist, or to
heckle him for not being a sociologist, when here he was all the time
with this mighty frenzy or heat in him that could melt down the chaos of
a world while we looked, weld it to his will, and then lift his arm and
smite it, though all men said him nay--back into a world again--to
heckle over this man's not being a complete sociologist or professor is
not worthy of thoughtful and manful men.

I cannot express it, but I can only declare, living as I do in a day
like this, that to me there is a kind of colossal naked poetry in what
Pierpont Morgan has done which I cannot but acknowledge with gratitude
and hope. Though there be in it, as in all massive things, a brutality
perhaps like that of the moving glaciers, like the making and boiling of
coal in the earth, like death, like childbirth, like the impersonality
of the sea, my imagination can never get past a kind of elemental,
almost heathen poetry or heathen-god poetry in Pierpont Morgan's Blow or
shock upon our world. There may be reason to doubt as to whether it is
to be called a heaven-poetry or a hell-poetry--something so gaunt and
simple is there about it; but here we are with all our machines around
us, with our young, rough, fresh nations in the act of starting a great
civilization once more on this old and gentle earth, and I can only say
that poetry (though it be new, or different, or even a little terrible)
is the one thing that now, or in any other age, men begin great
civilizations with.

* * * * *

I have tried to express the spirit of what Morgan's genius seized
unconsciously by the grim, resistless will of his age, has wrought into
his career.

But in the background of my mind as I see Pierpont Morgan, there is
always the man who will take his place, and if I did not see the man
coming, and coming rapidly, who is to take Mr. Morgan's place, I admit
that Mr. Morgan himself would be a failure, a disaster, a closed wall at
the end of the world.

No one man will take Mr. Morgan's place, but the typical man in the
group of men that will take his place will justify Mr. Morgan's work, by
taking this world in his hand and riveting his vision on where Morgan's
vision leaves off. As Morgan has fused railroads, iron, coal,
steamships, seas, and cities, the next industrial genius shall fuse the
spirits and the wills of men. The Individu