him,
possessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.

Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number
employed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than
there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative
in creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else
there are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the fine
arts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shops
can hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather be
preachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the much
larger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemen
in the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they would
do the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing,
and make every one else respect it.

While the definition of a poet and a gentleman--that he is a man who
loves his work--might appear to make a new division of society, it is
a division that already exists in the actual life of the world, and
constitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had.

It may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter how
prosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon this
planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the
most hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing
in his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in
spite of himself, and whether he knows it or not.

So long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to
him, so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal,
the heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty and the
unconquerableness of that man, and of that man's delight, shall be
upon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all
on earth who overhear heaven.

Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal
connected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet.
It makes little difference what he says about it. In proportion as he
has power with a thing; in proportion as he makes the thing--be it a
bit of color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, or
a throttle--in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or express
what he wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and
earth cannot make him otherwise.

That the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward the