earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids
are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great
authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be
helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to
say, with the first full house this planet has afforded.

Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but
speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations
sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven
seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the
stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play
following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of
soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want
to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction
apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude.
Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The
wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet
applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One
would like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one
was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space.

I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or
had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write
in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was
that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around
all of us now--I do like to mention it.

When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time
to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel
steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why
it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and
watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the
foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the
drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the
last secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I
have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I
know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep
enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and
the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands
of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth wor