there, we
do not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, or in a Corliss
engine--a picture of the face of All-Man, mastering the
earth--silent--lifted to heaven.

V

THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS

It is not necessary, in order to connect a railway train with the
infinite, to see it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a huge
white hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite as infinite
flying through granite in Hoosac Mountain. Most people who do not
think there is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with flying
through granite as a trait of the infinite in a locomotive, and yet
these same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to where
infinity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky somewhere)--if they
could watch one night after night plowing through planets--would want
a poem written about it at once.

A man who has a theory he does not see poetry in a locomotive, does
not see it because theoretically he does not connect it with infinite
things: the things that poetry is usually about. The idea that the
infinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run on
a track (and be all the more infinite for not running off the track),
does not occur to him. The first thing he does when he is told to look
for the infinite in the world is to stop and think a moment, where he
is, and then look for it somewhere else.

It would seem to be the first idea of the infinite, in being infinite,
not to be anywhere else. It could not be anywhere else if it tried;
and if a locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in and out of the
fiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry in
it are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matter
of seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing it in enough of its actual
relations as it is, to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the
order, the energy, and the restfulness of the whole universe are
pulsing there through its wheels.

The times when we do not feel poetry in a locomotive are the times
when we are not matter-of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough of
its actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makes
anything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as
the symbol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded symbol of
everything else in the universe--the summing up of everything
else--another whisper of God's.

Have I not seen the great Sun Itself, fro