he
earth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd it into steel and iron and
say, "Go ye now, depths of the earth--heights of heaven--serve ye me.
I, too, am God. Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the
spirit that is in thee is my spirit. I also--even I also--am God!"

V

A MODEST UNIVERSE

I have heard it objected that a machine does not take hold of a man
with its great ideas while he stands and watches it. It does not make
him feel its great ideas. And therefore it is denied that it is
poetic.

The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts of machinery is not
denied. What seems to be lacking in the machines from the artistic
point of view at present is a mere knack of making the faces plain and
literal-looking. Grasshoppers would be more appreciated by more people
if they were made with microscopes on,--either the grasshoppers or the
people.

If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain and
large enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by
it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have
been) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies
towering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a
grasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across
valleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and
villages--would have been one of the impressive features of human
life. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a
grasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was
creative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of
having such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping
softly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and
yet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread
over several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not
impressed by it.

But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There
is something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of
machinery. "The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is
not poetic." "A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as
its form expresses its nature." Mechanical inventions may stand for
impressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the
facts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses
those facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of
battle, for instance, is impress