, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walled
in forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels.

"No inspiring emotions," says the literary definition, "ideas or
conceptions can possibly be connected with machinery--or ever will
be."

What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of
its natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the
roof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the
way of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that
we, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally
safe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take
comfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around
us. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our
gates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows
herds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the
morning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have
done what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have
laid the boundary line of beauty?... The huge, hurrying, helpless
world in its belts and spindles--the people who are going to be
obliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little
more--all this--the great strenuous problem--the defense of beauty,
the saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of it
with life-all these?... Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the
noises of the street. A little longer ... the low singing to
ourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our graves
shall be as the passing of silence.

Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society of
his kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he
wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not
know. I only know how it is now.

They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors,
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip--drip.

Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.

III

SOULS OF MACHINES

It does not make very much difference to the machines whether there is
p