s as
much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The
locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives
her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches
the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of
infinity.

This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional
poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our
traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established
institution in human life, and infinity is not.

No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world
was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were
afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over
them. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people
to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably
employed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured
policeman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.

The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference
was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky
off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a
kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and
homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the
sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough.
Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it
beautiful.

Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another
way--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to
make it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new
religion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the
ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars,
its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the
past. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our
human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests'
wilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with
little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.

It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has
seen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what
is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out
at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about
philo