This, then, is Lowell,--a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac with the sights and sounds of trade and industry. Marvellously here have art and labor wrought their modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact that a few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued to the purposes of man and charmed into slavish subjection to the wizard of mechanism, rolled unchecked towards the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled down their falls in the wild freedom of Nature. A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the millennium of steam engines and cotton mills. Work is here the patron saint. Everything bears his image and superscription. Here is no place for that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen, and their much vilified brethren, familiarly known as loafers. Over the gateways of this new world Manchester glares the inscription, "Work, or die". Here "Every worm beneath the moon Draws different threads, and late or soon Spins, toiling out his own cocoon." The founders of this city probably never dreamed of the theory of Charles Lamb in respect to the origin of labor:-- "Who first invented work, and thereby bound The holiday rejoicing spirit down To the never-ceasing importunity Of business in the green fields and the town? "Sabbathless Satan,--he who his unglad Task ever plies midst rotatory burnings For wrath divine has made him like a wheel In that red realm from whence are no returnings."