All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments, It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of the women’s chorus, It is nearer and farther than they.
Will the whole come back then? Can each see signs of the best by a look in the looking-glass? is there nothing greater or more? Does all sit there with you, with the mystic unseen soul?
Strange and hard that paradox true I give, Objects gross and the unseen soul are one.
House-building, measuring, sawing the boards, Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering, tin-roofing, shingle-dressing, Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of sidewalks by flaggers, The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln, Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness, echoes, songs, what meditations, what vast native thoughts looking through smutch’d faces, Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains or by river-banks, men around feeling the melt with huge crowbars, lumps of ore, the due combining of ore, limestone, coal, The blast-furnace and the puddling-furnace, the loup-lump at the bottom of the melt at last, the rolling-mill, the stumpy bars of pig-iron, the strong clean-shaped T-rail for railroads, Oil-works, silk-works, white-lead-works, the sugar-house, steam-saws, the great mills and factories, Stone-cutting, shapely trimmings for façades or window or door-lintels, the mallet, the tooth-chisel, the jib to protect the thumb, The calking-iron, the kettle of boiling vault-cement, and the fire under the kettle,