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