In spite of all that beauty may disown In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time, Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space, Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime. Tennyson was forced to accept the train, but he handled it gingerly. _Lady Godiva_ has this short prelude to show his broadmindedness; but it is only a foil to the romantic story: I waited for the train at Coventry; I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge, To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped The city’s ancient legend into this:-- In “_Mechanophilus_--in the time of the first railways” he frankly romanticizes: Now first we stand and understand, And sunder false from true, And handle boldly with the hand, And see and shape and do. Dash back that ocean with a pier, Strow yonder mountain flat, A railway there, a tunnel here, Mix we this Zone with that.... As we surpass our fathers’ skill, Our sons will shame our own; A thousand things are hidden still And not a hundred known.... Browning was rather more courageous; he first introduced the train as a commonplace into poetry, but through the back door, in what was known as serio-comic verse. The lines are from _Christmas-Eve and Easter-day_: A tune was born in my head last week Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester; And when, next week, I take it back again, My head will sing to the engine’s clack again While it only makes my neighbour’s haunches stir. By the use of rhymes like ‘back again’ and ‘engines clack again’, ‘Manchester’ and ‘haunches stir’, he is saying in effect that a train is no proper subject for true poetical feelings; that as it is a part of modern life we must include it in our poems but in the low style proper to it. Emily Dickinson was perhaps the first to confess to a feeling of personal affection for the train as such: I love to see it lap the miles, And lick the valleys up, And pause to feed itself at tanks; And then prodigious, step Around a pile of mountains And, supercilious, peer In shanties by the sides of roads.... And neigh like Boanerges; Then, punctual as a star, Stop--docile and omnipotent-- At its own stable door. To John Davidson it was an appealing creature, too, although more terrible; in no way comic. His _Song of the Train_ begins: A monster taught To come to hand Amain, As swift as thought Across the land The train. ... O’er bosky dens By marsh and mead, Forest and fens Embodied speed Is clanked and hurled.... In a poem of Mr. Robert Nichols we find the train treated with more modern nonchalance. _The Express: Hereford to London_ begins: