To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where
iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull
as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them
is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our
ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the
making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in
this second generation of steam. Pereunt et imputantur; they pass
away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For
ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of
the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed -- not fully nor
worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson
for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to
immediate recognition as poetic material. ``For as it is dislocation
and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet,
who re-attaches things to Nature and the whole -- re-attaching even
artificial things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper
insight -- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts''; so
that he looks upon ``the factory village and the railway'' and ``sees
them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the
spider's geometrical web.'' The poet, however, seems hard to convince
hereof. Emerson will have it that ``Nature loves the gliding train of
cars''; ``instead of which'' the poet still goes about the country
singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible and liberal.
Turner saw and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its
kinship with the elements, and to blend furnace-glare and rush of iron
with the storm-shower, the wind and the thwart-flashing sun-rays, and
to make the whole a single expression of irresoluble force. And even
in a certain work by another and a very different painter -- though I