high heaven, and holding it there, while the
will of a child to another child ticks round the earth. "Time shall be
folded up as a scroll," saith the voice of Man, my Brother. "The
spaces between the hills, to ME," saith the Voice, "shall be as though
they were not."

The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.

It is the voice of the machines.

II

AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY

In its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its
conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented
fact. The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a
traditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life
to-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out.
Leaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the
people of the world have had to be left out with it.

Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see
poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.

The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his
mother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards,
he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by
a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were
built in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food has
come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him
by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the
clothes he wears was flashed together by looms.

The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion
and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds
that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a
machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels
or of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great
whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the
system--that is, the Machine--be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or
spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the
beginning of the world.

The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a
huge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main
fact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very
well, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may
be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He
learns before many years that this great m