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iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull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 --