“I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown ironstone out of the ground, and forge it into that! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile--a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous drop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this--who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will, feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of shadow of something else--mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them? “But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse, who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by stokers’ fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.” He further concedes that “steam, or any mode of heat power, may only be employed, justifiably, under extreme or special conditions of need; and for speed on main lines of communication, and raising water from great depths, or other such work beyond human strength.” This is a very large concession, and may be received with large gratitude. He even permits steam machinery for such purposes as “the deepening of large river channels; changing the surfaces of mountainous districts; irrigating tracts of desert in the torrid zone; breaking up and thus rendering capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, etc., so rendering parts of the earth habitable, which hitherto have been lifeless.”[126]