ather
be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I
hear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, the
great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the
thunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there on
the roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, past
glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him
(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on the
switch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth and
sky.... The cities swoon before him ... swoon past him. Thundering
past his own thunder, echoes dying away ... and now out in the great
plain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, little
black miles.... Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder,
thinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughs
bitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men with
tickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) he
is not infallible. Once ... twice ... he might have ... he almost....
Then suddenly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his teeth, he reaches
out with his soul ... masters it, he strains himself up to his
infallibility again ... all those people there ... fathers, mothers,
children, ... sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as the
minister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on a
Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God
... alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads.

But I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can see
at a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)
which make the big companions. It is a mere matter of getting
acquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woven
through with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors.

I have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spirits
of the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer with
us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked in
cemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them with
mighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence,
walk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in show
windows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into
them. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little
last