ed not to have poetry in it
at all. The same general principle holds good with every machine that
has been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works on
it, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, if
one watches it in its various stages, always consists in making a
machine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive,
puffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, was
much more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the present
one, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was more
impressive than the present one. Every one remembers it,--the
important-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty
years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaseless
water-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and its
huge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations,
ringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It was
impossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without always
thinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was always
doing things--now at one end of the train and now at the other,
ringing its bell down the track, blowing in at the windows, it fumed
and spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to get
to Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines
were made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, and
scarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he is
going, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that.

The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silent
ones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of
space--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting the
world--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, for
the very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are less
showy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect.

In proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses to
look as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost always
a sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some one
else. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is a
giant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding,
is not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists at
all in the modern age, either in its machinery or it