. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “In storm and darkness, night and day, Through mountain gorge or level way, With lightening rein and might unspent, And head erect in scorn of space, Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race, Flame-girt across a continent. Think not of danger; every wheel Of all that clank and roll below Rings singing answers, steel for steel, Beneath the hammer’s testing blow; And what though fields go swirling round, And backward swims the mazy ground, So swift the herds seem standing still, As scared they dash from hill to hill; And though the brakes may grind to fire The gravel as they grip the tire And holding, strike a startling vein Of tremor through the surging train, The hand of him who guides the rein Is all-controlling and intent; Fear not, although the race you ride Is on the whirlwind, side by side, With time across a continent.” What are the sources of the interesting in life? Novelty is one, but it is short-lived; beauty and sublimity are others, and are more lasting. But the main source of the interesting is human association. The landscape that is written over with human history, how it holds us and draws us! All phases of modern industrial life--the miner, the lumberman, the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are available for poetic treatment to him who can bring the proper fund of human association, who can make the human element in these things paramount over the mechanical element. The more of nature you get in, the more the picture has a background of earth and sky, or of great human passions and heroisms, the more the imagination is warmed and moved. The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it has a mighty background. In itself it is at war with every feature of the landscape it passes through; it stains the snows, it befouls the water, it poisons the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels the peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural divinity. It adapts itself to nothing; it is as arbitrary as a cyclone and as killing as a pestilence. Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and darkness, racing with winds and clouds, is a sublime object to contemplate; it is sublime because of its triumph over time and space, and because of the danger and dread that compass it about. It has a tremendous human background. The body-killing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to our civilization are not of themselves suggestive of poetic thoughts; but if Dante made poetry out of hell, would not a nature copious and powerful enough make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of our materialistic civilization? VIII POETRY AND ELOQUENCE “Where does eloquence end, where does poetry begin?” inquires Renan in his “Future of Science.” And he goes on to say, “The whole difference lies in a peculiar harmony, in a more or less sonorous ring, with regard to which an experienced faculty never hesitates.”