machine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the
apparent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in
all essential respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has ever
known an inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feeling
toward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know that
men are living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (their
faces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but
dying now, this very moment, to make a machine live,--martyrs of
valves and wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, tireless,
unconquerable men?

To know an inventor the moment of his triumph,--the moment when,
working his will before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent,
massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls
and the needs of their bodies,--to know an inventor at all is to know
that at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep,
soft as from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that
Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and
watching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and
joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make,
from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is,
after all the praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and
cog and wheel--is it not more than these to him standing before it
there? It is the face of matter--who does not know it?--answering the
face of the man, whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.

What is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the
men who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer and
the mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Their
days are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same
unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They
begin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and
wheels, or of great waters.

As I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was
holding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag,
and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him,
headlight, clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every
brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the
switch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and
gave th