The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it does not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I, comrade nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor God's machine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the meaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile, creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not HERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our veins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the immeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to be--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the infinite, beckon and are still. I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express themselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know that when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looks out upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, with their huge machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out upon me. I rest. I know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my soul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me I grow strong and glad. PART THREE THE MACHINES AS POETS I PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS I have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the main lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near by and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about art. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do now--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of things one wishes one had said, afterward. We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about other things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time, that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things That Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.