nly in the observation and
experience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do
it at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets have
admitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before
mountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When the
sailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on the
decks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minor
poets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and
obliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close
to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If
he must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he
selects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at
night singing to his bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.
There is not a passenger on the Empire State Express, this moment,
being whirled to the West, who could not write a sonnet on it,--not a
man of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through space
behind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and
write a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street
could write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was
dead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time to
bring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still
alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it is
going to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns
of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe
where poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world,
and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor
and unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man
who would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than
to have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from
the old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger
where she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. He
spends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in and
out, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, and
talking with them. Nothing can take him away.

Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection
for his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her
breath with his will does not put his