But all here is a scene of miracle. In our perverseness we laugh
at our "Lady of Loretto," and pretend to doubt her house being
carried from Jerusalem on the backs of angels. But what right have
I to doubt, where so many millions are ready to take their oaths
to the fact? What is it to us how many angels might be required
for the operation? or how much their backs may have been galled in
the carriage? The result is every thing. But here we have before
our sceptical eyes the very same result. We have St Catherine's
hospital, fifty times the size, transported half-a-dozen miles, and
deposited in the Regent's Park. The Virgin came alone. The hospital
came, with all its fellows, their matrons, and their master. The
virgin-house left only a solitary excavation in a hillside. The
hospital left a mighty dock, filled with a fleet that would have
astonished Tyre and Sidon, buildings worthy of Babylon, and a
population that would have sacked Persepolis.
But, what is this strangely shaped vessel, which lies anchored stem
and stern in the centre of the stream, and bearing a flag covered
over with characters which as we pass look like hieroglyphics? The
barge which marks the Tunnel. We are now moving above the World's
Wonder! A thousand men, women, and children, have marched under
that barge's keel since morning; lamps are burning fifty feet under
water, human beings are breathing, where nothing but the bones of a
mammoth ever lay before, and check-takers are rattling pence, where
the sound of coin was never heard since the days of the original
Chaos.
What a field for theory! What a subject for a fashionable Lecturer!
What a topic for the gossipry of itinerant science, telling us (on
its own infallible authority) how the globe has been patched up for
us, the degenerated and late-born sons of Adam! How glowingly might
their fancy lucubrate on the history of the prior and primitive
races which may now be perforating the interior strata of the
globe--working by their own gas-light, manufacturing their own
metals, and, from their want of the Davy-lamp, (and of an Act of
Parliament, to make it burn,) producing those explosions which _we_
call earthquakes, while our volcanoes are merely the tops of their
chimneys!
I gave the Tunnel a parting aspiration--
THE TUNNEL.
Genii of the Diving-bell!
Sing Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l,
Whether ye parboil in steam,
Whether float in lightning's beam,
Whether in the Champs Elysés
Dance ye, like Carlotta Grisi.
Take your trumps, the fame to swell,
Of Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l.
Phantoms of the fiery crown!
Plunged ten thousand fathoms down
In the deep Pacific's wave,
In the Ocean's central cave,
Where the infant earthquakes sleep,
Where the young tornadoes creep.
Chant the praise, where'er ye dwell,
Of Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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