th century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not
been known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a
glass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to
discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the
ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would
not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact
that Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new
heaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of
it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope
invented later, which never worked.

Nothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R----
typewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must
have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The
machine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and
ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line
with his foot.

The same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery
and through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The
overshot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion,
literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common men
began to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came
in--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no
denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its
work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but
it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the
drippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the
turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work.
The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand
horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as
six turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the
Falls.

The main fact about the modern man as regards poetry is, that he
prefers poetry that has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It is
because most of the poetry the modern man gets a chance to see to-day
is merely going over the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal
to the modern man. He supposes so himself. He supposes that a dynamo
(forty street-cars on forty streets, flying through the dark) is not
poetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, spellbound, more
than