Round me blow
Blow to the unknown again.

Out in its solitude I hear the prow
Beyond the silence-crowded decks
Laughing and shouting
At Night,
Lashing the heads and necks
Of the lifted seas,
That in their flight
Urge onward
And rise and sweep and leap and sink
To the very brink
Of Heaven.

Timber and steel and smoke
And Sleep
Thousand-souled
A quiver,
A deadened thunder,
A vague and countless creep
Through the hold,
The weird and dusky chariot lunges on
Through Fate.
From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes
Above the houses of the deep
Their shadowy haunches fall and rise
--O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs
The flying of their hoofs,
Through the wonder and the dark
Where skies and waters meet
The shimmer of manes and knees
Dust of seas...
The sound of breathing, urge, confusion
And the beat, the starlight beat
Soft and far and stealthy-fleet
Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.

II

ON BEING BUSY AND STILL

One of the hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines
(excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the
phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed
to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey,
and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being
impressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed
because it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked
through its nose.

The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to
know it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his
imagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the
outside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a
twin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.
This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its
poetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in
the big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy
paddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in
the sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.

People who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit that
there is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A
Dutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved so
much that it does not flourish, is suppos