mighty city. Out over the red pines, the lonely
gorse fields, I have seen passing the spirit of the Strand. I have seen
the great flocking bridges and the roar about St. Paul's in communion
with the treetops and with the hedgerows and with the little brooks, all
in six seconds, when an engine, with its vision like a cloud of glory
swept past.

And yet there are people in Oxford who tell me that an engine when it is
in the very act of expressing such stupendous and boundless thoughts, of
making such mighty and beautiful things happen, is not beautiful, that
it has nothing to do with art. They can but watch the machines, the
earth black with them, going about everywhere mowing down great nations
and rolling under the souls of men.

I cannot see it so. I see a thousand thousand engines carrying dew and
green fields to the stones of London. I see the desires of the earth
hastening. The ships and the wireless telegraph beckon the wills of
cities on the seas and on the sky. With the machines I have taken a
whole planet to me for my feet and for my hands. I gesture with the
earth. I hand up oceans to my God.

CHAPTER IV

DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL!

There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful, and cannot
make for beauty, because machines are dead.

I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead.

I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of
Man like nails, like vast antennae--a kind of enormous, more unconscious
sub-body. They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue
than tongues or eyes or flesh; and like all bones they do not renew, of
course, as often or as rapidly as flesh. But the difference between live
and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the
difference between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea a live
thing is, that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every
minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to
the intelligence that created it and that keeps re-creating it. I have
known thousands of factories; and every factory I have known that is
really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its
old self. All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month
by month are being renewed and shedding themselves. Any live factory can
always be seen moulting year after year. A live spirit goes all through
the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of in