that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for
the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about
me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in
a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men
and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them,
to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many
'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and
corners of the City.

As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the
buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those
great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up
and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long
glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels
of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the
dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled
fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats
beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems
something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something
like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the
world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say,
senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will
the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that?
or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of
labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows?
These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not
for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly
to estimate and prophesy concerning them.

Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's