At the same time, a mechanical and industrial age like ours no doubt offers a harder problem to the imaginative producer than the ages of faith and fanaticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of our civilization, what can the poet make of it? The clank of machinery, it must be confessed, is less inspiring than the clash of arms; the railroad is less pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way, the steamship seems unrelated to the great forces and currents of the globe. Yet to put these things in poetry only requires time, only requires a more complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence the proper vista and association. As is always the case, it is a question of the man and not of the material. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German æsthetical people are always talking about poetical and unpoetical objects, and in one respect they are not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly,”--if he can throw enough feeling into it. I lately read a poem by one of our younger poets on an entirely modern theme, the building of the railroad,--the gang of men cutting through hills, tunneling mountains, filling valleys, bridging chasms, etc. But, though vividly described, it did not quite reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the human; it was realistic without the freeing touch of the idealistic. Some story, some interest, some enthusiasm overarching it, would have supplied an atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be permanently interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute power unless they are in some way related to life and its aspirations. The battle of man with man is more interesting than the battle of man with rocks and chasms, because men can strike back, and victory is not to be had on such easy terms. The same objection cannot be urged against Mr. William Vaughn Moody’s poem on the steam engine, which he treats under the figure of “The Brute,”--a poem of great imaginative power in which the human interest is constantly paramount. The still small voice of humanity is always heard through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first stanza:-- “Through his might men work their wills; They have boweled out the hills For food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought; And they fling him hour by hour Limbs of men to give him power. Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devour Children’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought. He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.” Quite different is the treatment of “The Lightning Express” by a western poet, Mr. J. P. Irvine, yet the poetic note is clearly and surely struck in his stanzas too:--