esses and railways have been supplied, wireless
telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we
have put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it
looks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just
being finished up, now, for a Great Author.

It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a
prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the
modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world
full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the
wrong size.

The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical
way, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its
poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it
is quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its
machines and things making preparations for bigger ones.

I have thought the great authors in every age were made by the
greatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice,
have felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes
been called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds,
by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him
in His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost any
one who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that
Jesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have
missed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at
least--ideas that nations would be born for.

It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the
great prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations
and that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the
whole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a
whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like
galleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no
particular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail
across an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth
in him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.
He discovered America because he felt crowded.

One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of
immortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic
fact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness.
When people hav