and that they and their churches and popes and
pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years
like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them
good. It started them looking Up, and looking the other way for power.

Very soon afterward Columbus enlarged upon the same idea by starting the
world toward very far things, on the ground; and he bored through the
skylines, a thousand skylines, and spread the nations upon the sea.
Columbus was the typical modern man led by the invisible, the
intangible; and on the great waters somewhere between Spain and New
York, between the old and the new, Columbus discovered the Future Tense,
the centrifugal tense, the tense that sweeps in the unknown, and gathers
in, out of space, out of hope, out of faith, the lives of men. The mere
fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the
world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and
to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women.... Then
miners, mariners, explorers, inventors--the impossible steamship, the
railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac
tunnels and Atlantic cables. The impossible became one of the habits of
modern life.

Of course the sky and the air and the unknown and the future had been
recognized before, but only a little and in a rather patronizing way.
But when a world has made a great, solid continent by following a
horizon line, it begins to take things just beyond very seriously. And
so our Time has been fulfilled. We have had the stone age; we have had
the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and
sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's
visions, towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out
of their hearts.

* * * * *

Not long ago, as I was coming away from New York in the Springfield
Express, which was running at fifty-five miles an hour, I saw suddenly
some smoke coming up apparently out of a satchel on the floor, belonging
to the man in the chair in front of me. I moved the satchel away, and
the smoke came up through the carpet. I spoke to the Pullman conductor
who was passing through, and in a second the train had stopped, and the
great wild roaring Thing had ceased, and we stood in a long, wide, white
silence in the fields. We got off the car--some of us--to see what had
happened, and