On our way to this feast of solids we must step for a moment into St.
Paul's and listen to the great commemorative concert of sixty-five
hundred voices that swept all cavilers, foreign and domestic, off
their feet, brought tears to the most sternly critical eye, and caused
the composer, Cramer, to exclaim, as he looked up into the great dome,
filled with the volume of harmony, "Cosa stupenda! stupenda! La gloria
d'Inghilterra!"

A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron--from a concord of
sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five
millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the
yearly product at that time of England! She has since doubled that of
iron, and nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress
in the harvest of good music and good pictures. Forced by economical
necessity and assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a
great deal farther than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that
eighty-one per cent. of that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and
when the "duty" of a bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less
than half what it now is. The United States have the benefit of these
improvements, at the same time that their yield of coal has swelled
from four millions of tons at that time to more than fifty now, and
of iron in a large though not equal ratio. The Lake Superior region,
which rested its claims on a sample of its then annual product of one
hundred tons of copper, now exports seven hundred thousand tons of
iron ore.

Steel, now replacing iron in some of its heaviest uses, appeared as
almost an article of luxury in the shape of knives, scissors and the
like. The success of the Hindus in its production was quite envied and