(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 impress