A moral is this aria from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus:

How vain is man, who boasts in fight
The valor of gigantic might,
And dreams not that a hand unseen
Directs and guides this huge machine!

But the libretto directs that the aria’s performer be a coloratura tenor, not a man in coveralls with a dented oilcan and lungs full of coal smoke. The unseen hand and its score are a musical machinery, but the mustached body once was warm and tangible.

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From “Group of Lackawanna freight engines,” between 1890 and 1901, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016801376/. In 2020 I posted to this blog an earlier edit of the image (no longer shown) under the title “Man in City.” The city is Scranton, Pennsylvania, which between 1851 and 1960 was the headquarters of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.