ng the things the Greeks
liked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would
like now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin to
enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the
chance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more
out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I
suspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William
Watson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in
Schenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anything
else for the rest of their natural lives."

I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the
machines that a Greek would see, as yet.

But I have seen enough.

I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small
enough, welding the nations together before my eyes.

I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of
visions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the
world.

I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men--the five thousand of
them--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted
railroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them
there with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities,
putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that
Bliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them ...
brother-artists every one ... in the glory ... in the dark ...
Vulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skyscrapers,
steam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and
the earth.

II

HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

The poetry of machinery to-day is a mere matter of fact--a part of the
daily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing the
world wants to know about machinery is not that there is poetry in it,
but that the poetry which the common people have already found there,
has a right to be there. We have the fact. It is the theory to put
with the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles us
most. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solid
comfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory to
approve of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make very
much difference.

1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is an expression of the soul.

2. It expresses the soul (1) of the indivi