Oh, that I were the Spirit of a Plant, Rear’d in Imagination’s evergreen world,— To lift my head above the meadow grass, And strike my roots, far-spread and intervolved, Deep as the Central Heart, wherefrom to taste The springs of infinite being! From that source What pregnant fermentations would arise; What blossom, fruit, perfume, and influence; To purify mankind’s destructive blood,— So full of life and elevating powers— So cloy’d and clogg’d for exercise of good. THE BLACK DIAMONDS OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER I.—THE DIAMONDS. The history and adventures of the ‘great diamonds’ of Eastern, Northern, Southern, and Western potentates, have been often chronicled; their several values have been estimated at hundreds of thousands, and at millions; but not a syllable has ever been breathed of their utility. The reason is tolerably obvious; these magnificent diamonds are of _no_ practical use at all, being purely ornamental luxuries. Now, it has occurred to us that the diamonds indigenous to England, are the converse of these brilliant usurpers of the chief fame of the nether earth (to say nothing of the vain-glories on the upper surface) being black, instead of prismatic white—opaque, instead of transpicuous; and in place of deriving a fictitious and fluctuating value from scarcity and ornamental beauty, deriving their value from the realities of their surpassing utility and great abundance. They certainly make no very striking figure in the ball-room dress of prince or princess; but it is their destiny and office to carry comfort to the poor man’s home, as well as to the mansion of the rich; they are not to be looked upon as treasures of beauty, they are to be shovelled out and burnt; they are not the bright emblems of no change, and no activity, but like heralds, sent from the depths of night, where Nature works her secret wonders, to advance those sciences and industrial arts which are equally the consequence and the re-acting cause of the progress of humanity. In the reign of King Edward the First of England, a new fuel was brought to London, much to his subjects’ objection and the perplexity of his majesty. Listen to the history—not of the king, but of the great event of his time which few historians mention.