At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down the long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud floating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long wavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a great Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it almost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud propelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen a broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train of cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its whistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire by night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither is the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning building pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the car-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this ghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it, gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away into heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or passing of the spirit of the age. When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting Number Eight to Springfield. VI THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats quietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then could watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before our eyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and their last wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to know why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their new things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness. Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be arranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery seems to be to every man's personal everyday instinct and experience. We have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it. I do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But there is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one permission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable to enjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I felt I had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be skipped. 1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea. 2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea. 3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately expressed.