If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain and large enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have been) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies towering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a grasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across valleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and villages--would have been one of the impressive features of human life. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a grasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was creative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of having such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping softly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and yet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread over several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not impressed by it. But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There is something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of machinery. "The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is not poetic." "A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as its form expresses its nature." Mechanical inventions may stand for impressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the facts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses those facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of battle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full of dynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not. That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it, if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember the day when he all but lost his life because A pill-box by the river's brim A simple pill-box was to him And nothing more. Wordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an issue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its language, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it looks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The language is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry in machinery.