Pagan Papers | Page 3

of men
below -- not even their company. To-morrow you shall begin life again:
shall write your book, make your fortune, do anything; meanwhile you
sit, and the jolly world swings round, and you seem to hear it circle to
the music of the spheres. What pipe was ever thus beatifying in effect?
You are aching all over, and enjoying it; and the scent of the limes
drifts in through the window. This is undoubtedly the best and greatest
country in the world; and none but good fellows abide in it.
Laud we the Gods, And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our blest altars. The Romance of the Rail
In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that
is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of the
steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer
begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier times, three
hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out from the
prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not rightly
whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or if it
were not North and South America. ``And there be certaine flitting
islands,'' says one, ``which have been oftentimes seene, and when men
approached near them they vanished.'' ``It may be that the gulfs will
wash us down,'' said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans call the

``getting-off place''); ``it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.'' And
so on, and so on; each with his special hope or ``wild surmise.'' There
was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles. And in that first fair
world whose men and manners we knew through story-books, before
experience taught us far other, the Prince mounts his horse one fine
morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning, lo!
a new country: and he rides by fields and granges never visited before,
through faces strange to him, to where an unknown King steps down to
welcome the mysterious stranger. And he marries the Princess, and
dwells content for many a year; till one day he thinks ``I will look upon
my father's face again, though the leagues be long to my own land.''
And he rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning he is
made welcome at home, where his name has become a dim memory.
Which is all as it should be; for, annihilate time and space as you may,
a man's stride remains the true standard of distance; an eternal and
unalterable scale. The severe horizon, too, repels the thoughts as you
gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about, within touch and hail;
and the night cometh, when no man can work.
To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where iron
has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull as the
measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them is now
a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our ordinary
course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the making of
character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in this second
generation of steam. Pereunt et imputantur; they pass away, and are
scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For ourselves, our peculiar
slate is probably filling fast. The romance of the steam-engine is yet to
be captured and expressed -- not fully nor worthily, perhaps, until it too
is a vanished regret; though Emerson for one will not have it so, and
maintains and justifies its right to immediate recognition as poetic
material. ``For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God
that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to Nature and
the whole -- re-attaching even artificial things and violations of Nature
to Nature by a deeper insight -- disposes very easily of the most
disagreeable facts''; so that he looks upon ``the factory village and the
railway'' and ``sees them fall within the great Order not less than the

bee-hive or the spider's geometrical web.'' The poet, however, seems
hard to convince hereof. Emerson will have it that ``Nature loves the
gliding train of cars''; ``instead of which'' the poet still goes about the
country singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible and
liberal. Turner saw and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its
kinship with the elements, and to blend furnace-glare and rush of iron
with the storm-shower, the wind and the thwart-flashing sun-rays, and
to make the whole a single expression of irresoluble