"This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, Like a huge organ rise the burnished arms; But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms. "Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, When the death-angel touches those swift keys! What loud lament and dismal Miserere Will mingle with their awful symphonies! "I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus, The cries of agony, the endless groan, Which, through the ages that have gone before us, In long reverberations reach our own. * * * * * "Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts: "The warrior's name would be a name abhorred! And every nation that should lift again Its hand against a brother, on its forehead Would wear for evermore the curse of Cain! "Down the dark future, through long generations, The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease; And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations, I hear once more the voice of Christ say 'Peace!' "Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals The blast of war's great organ shakes the skies! But beautiful as songs of the immortals, The holy melodies of Love arise." At Springfield the Agawam River flows from the westward into the Connecticut, and along its broad bordering meadows comes the Boston and Albany Railroad. This is one of the Vanderbilt lines, crossing Massachusetts from the Berkshires to Boston, and it was among the earliest railways built in New England, being in construction from 1833 to 1842. The project while zealously pushed was then generally derided as chimerical, the Boston _Courier_ of that time saying the road could only be built at "an expense of little less than the market value of the whole territory of Massachusetts, and, if practicable, every person of common sense knows it would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon." Yet it was built, and prospered so much that, to break its profitable monopoly, Massachusetts had afterwards to bore the costly Hoosac Tunnel on the only available route, to provide a competing line. The railroad climbs up the Taghkanic range from the Hudson River Valley, crosses the Berkshire Hills, going through Pittsfield and over Hoosac Mountain at an elevation of fourteen hundred and fifty feet, then coming down a wild and picturesque defile made by a mountain brook flowing into Westfield River, which in turn flows into the Agawam. It is a route of magnificent scenery, gradually leading from a mountain gorge to a broadening intervale, where it passes the fertile Indian domain of Woronoco and the pleasant town of Westfield, noted for its whips and cigars.