Industrial Niagara 



machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, 1906 

 no dirt at all. The wheel-pit into which one descends has an 

 almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These 

 are altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering 

 monsters, great sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in 

 their sleep. They sprang, armed like Minerva, from serene and 

 speculative, foreseeing and endeavoring brains. First was the 

 word and then these powers. A man goes to and fro quietly in 

 the long clean hall of the dynamos. There is no clangor, no 

 racket. Yet the outer rim of the big generators is spinning at 

 the pace of a hundred thousand miles an hour; the dazzling clean 

 switch-board, with its little handles and levers, is the seat of 

 empire over more power than the strength of a million disciplined, 

 unquestioning men. All these great things are as silent, as won- 

 derfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and 

 stronger than that. 



When I thought that these two huge wheel-pits of this com- 

 pany are themselves but a little intimation of what can be done 

 in this way, what will be done in this way, my imagination 

 towered above me. I fell into a day-dream of the coming power 

 of men, and how that power may be used by them. 



For surely the greatness of life is still to come; it is not in such 

 accidents as mountains or the sea. I have seen the splendor of 

 the mountains, sunrise and sunset among them, and the waste 

 immensity of sky and sea. I am not blind because I can see 

 beyond these glories. To me no other thing is credible than 

 that all the natural beauty in the world is only so much material 

 for the imagination and the mind, so many hints and suggestions 

 for art and creation. Whatever is, is but the lure and symbol 

 towards what can be willed and done. Man lives to make — in 

 the end he must make, for there will be nothing left for him to do. 



And the world he will make — after a thousand years or so ! 



I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the accidental, unmean- 

 ing beauty that is going for the sake of the beauty of the fine 

 order and intention that will come. I believe — passionately 



1035 



