When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the last secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the word that was given to me to say. Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful, clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and actions great in the world? Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished, lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One sees the sign on it TO LET TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT. VIII THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP "_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me Of some transcendent music I have heard; No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered, No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory. But a glad strain of some still symphony That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._" Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle Reader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as you stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in your being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people in it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls say it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in the street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls, that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O to know--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second, twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to be sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets and silent houses of it!"