To lop away the half of a pine is only to see
how beautiful the other half is. The other half has the infinite in
it. However little of a pine is left it suggests everything there is.
It points to the universe and beckons to the Night and the Day. The
infinite still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the prophet of trees.
In the sad lands it but grows more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit
of the tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite--of
everywhere--wherever its shadow falls. I have heard the sound of a
hammer in the street and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine
woods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud catches the great empty
spaces of night out of heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers
all sound into itself--echoes it along the infinite.

The pine may be said to be the symbol of the beauty in machinery,
because it is beautiful the way an electric light is beautiful, or an
electric-lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty that belong to
life: finite beauty, in that its beauty can be seen in itself, and
infinite beauty in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of the
beauty that cannot be seen, the beauty that dwells around it.

What is going to be called the typical power of the colossal art,
myriad-nationed, undreamed of men before, now gathering in our modern
life, is its symbolic power, its power of standing for more than
itself.

Every great invention of modern mechanical art and modern fine art has
held within it an extraordinary power of playing upon associations, of
playing upon the spirits and essences of things until the outer senses
are all gathered up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were meant to
be melted, into inner ones. What is wrought before the eyes of a man
at last by a great modern picture is not the picture that fronts him
on the wall, but a picture behind the picture, painted with the flame
of the heart on the eternal part of him. It is the business of a great
modern work of art to bring a man face to face with the greatness from
which it came. Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite,--and a
man and a woman. A picture with this feeling of the infinite painted
in it--behind it--which produces this feeling of the infinite in other
men by playing upon the infinite in their own lives, is a typical
modern masterpiece.

The days when the infinite is not in our own lives we do not see it.
If the infinite is in our own lives, and we do not like it