whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre of
soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the
trees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a
machine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not
full of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea,
after a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives were
like. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about each
other.

There are days when it has been given to me to see the machines as
inventors and prophets see them.

On these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. I
have seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the future
through their fingers.

On these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoples
singing in the streets.

* * * * *

And after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I have
come to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily
joy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking around
one, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all this
vast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and sounds
and symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere,
playing upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well,
when in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in order
around about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived.

This great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before,
always sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive
energy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see the
look of the future in its face.

And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live
forever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant
gesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now,
solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh,
unknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn
curtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence
and darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding,
forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And
then with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and
wonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside
living his great life around his little e