hips. One need not
fear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an
action of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste
of heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man
like this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms
him or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shall
be as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire
and wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and
Nothing are his servants.

The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics
saying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off
neglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision
of all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in
furs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep
warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats
on giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.
It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:
"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.
Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At
all events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet
he's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful
impossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking
for."

A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its
street pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,
which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which
has its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is
over the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights
railway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping
them, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a
race like this could not find some way at least of managing its own
planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming
it, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed
down in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the
waves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden
almost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at
herself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things
nowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock
company or break o