And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live forever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant gesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now, solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh, unknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn curtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence and darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding, forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And then with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and wonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside living his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK PART ONE I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies and songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century. "If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill." II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven to his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are getting their living out of machines, or putting their living into them, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down under the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves him standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of communing with his kind. III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul or the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little while--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A little while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to feel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems at first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in machines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the machine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame that minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas. All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take the stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued existence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for modern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the crowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd, and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.