o be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up and
down the world,--looking upon the man's body,--the little funny one
that he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking upon
the one that he really has. When one considers what a man actually
does, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he
has been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of
central nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of
infinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, of
Nothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There
is something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out and
incomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say,
but not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently,
is a kind of light there is in it.

But the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same light
that reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames upon
heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it,
I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and
worshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great waters
and the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for a
body, which the man has.

I go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash of
black and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death,
disgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills,
and the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn the
papers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out through
the dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and the
Philippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices of
the nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the
man. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of the
man meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watched
them on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power,
ninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, ... thundering aisles of
souls ... on into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of the
man.

And when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently across
heaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of the
man is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, over
it, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look,
since I