, running a world. He delights in the Golden
Rule as a part of his love of nature. It is as the falling of apples to
him. He delights in it as he delights in frost and fire and in the
glorious, modest, implacable, hushed way they work!

We are in an age in which a Golden Rule can sing. The men around us are
in a new temper. They have the passion, almost, the religion of
precision that goes with machines.

While I have been sitting at my desk and writing these last words, the
two half-past-eight trains, at full speed, have met in the meadow.

There is something a little impersonal, almost abstracted, about the way
the trains meet out here on their lonely sidewalk through the meadow,
twenty inches apart--morning after morning. It always seems as if this
time--this one next time--they would not do it right. One argues it all
out unconsciously that of course there is a kind of understanding
between them as they come bearing down on each other and it's all been
arranged beforehand when they left their stations; and yet somehow as I
watch them flying up out of the distance, those two still, swift
thoughts, or shots of cities--dark, monstrous (it's as if Springfield
and Northampton had caught some people up and were firing them at each
other)--I am always wondering if this particular time there will not be
a report, after all, a clang on the landscape, on all the hills, and a
long story in the _Republican_ the next morning.

Then they softly crash together and pass on--two or three quiet whiffs
at each other--as if nothing had happened.

I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act
of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty
engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches
from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty
strips or ribbons of iron--a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a
wheel--I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full
of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still
valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal
souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through
Infinity--it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad
boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of
stern singing.

I know well enough, of course, that it is a platitude, this meeting of
two trains in a meadow, but it never acts