hand upon the throttle of
that ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who
shall seek to define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory,
in darkness or in day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of
life. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in his
engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to place
his hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that
this awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare to
touch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour
muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this,
climbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It is
impossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touch
sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind can
go, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the
west--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because
he means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a
poet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,
hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I
always see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through
the Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.

Who am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to
speak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that
I should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling
track--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the
man in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he
wears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and
the cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words
enough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life.
Standing in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrill
to his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of
the splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of his
life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as the
singing a man would sing who felt his hand on the throttle of things.
The engine is a soul to me--soul of the quiet face thundering
past--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling it
to the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it to
the trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, tha