The Voice of the Machines | Page 8

died in the course of time to bring the feeling of the sea
over into poetry, sailors who are still alive are allowed in it. It remains
to be seen how many wrecks it is going to take, lists of killed and
wounded, fatally injured, columns of engineers dying at their posts, to
penetrate the spiritual safe where poets are keeping their souls to-day,
untouched of the world, and bring home to them some sense of the
adventure and quiet splendor and unparalleled expressiveness of the
engineer's life. He is a man who would rather be without a life (so long
as he has his nerve) than to have to live one without an engine, and
when he climbs down from the old girl at last, to continue to live at all,
to him, is to linger where she is. He watches the track as a sailor
watches the sea. He spends his old age in the roundhouse. With the
engines coming in and out, one always sees him sitting in the sun there
until he dies, and talking with them. Nothing can take him away.
Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection
for his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her
breath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle of that ideal
and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who shall seek to
define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory, in darkness or in
day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of life. The engineer
who is not expressing his whole soul in his engine, and in the aisles of
souls behind him, is not worthy to place his hand upon an engine's
throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that this awful privilege should
be allowed to him, that he should dare to touch the motor nerve of her,
that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour muscles should be the slaves of the
fingers of a man like this, climbing the hills for him, circling the globe
for him? It is impossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a
single touch sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty
wind can go, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in

the west--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because
he means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a
poet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,
hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I
always see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through the
Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.
Who am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to
speak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that I
should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling track--and
not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the man in the
cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he wears not his
heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and the cloud of steam,
and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words enough? They are the
signals of this man's life beckoning to my life. Standing in his engine
there, making every wheel of that engine thrill to his will, he is the
priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of the splendor of the beauty
of power. The train is the voice of his life. The sound of its coming is a
psalm of strength. It is as the singing a man would sing who felt his
hand on the throttle of things. The engine is a soul to me--soul of the
quiet face thundering past--leading its troop of glories echoing along
the hills, telling it to the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air,
telling it to the trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing
things, that the might of the spirit of man has passed that way.
If an engine is to be looked at from the point of view of the man who
makes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a right to
be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression of the human
spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the human spirit, there
shall be no escape for the children of this present world, from the
wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in it that shall hem life
in,