I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to himself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them. The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to say, with the first full house this planet has afforded. Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude. Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One would like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space. I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around all of us now--I do like to mention it.