The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax

it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a huge white hill of cloud, as I di

nite in a locomotive, and yet these same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to where infinity is or is supposed to be (u

ally about. The idea that the infinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run on a track (and be all the more infinite for not running off the track), does

nd out of the fiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry in it are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matter of seeing a locomotive as it is, of seein

al relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makes anything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as the symbol, t

I have seen the leaves of the trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listened with my soul-tho

t on the hills, tunneling it through the rocks of the earth, piling it up on the crust of it, with winds and waters and fla

turally follows that the only way a modern artist can be a great artist in a modern

e most-and then play on those symbols and let those symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program is something like this. The modern age means the infin

f 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

992 from the roundhouse escorti