willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate romantic intention -- you
shall find the element of romance in the vestiges of the old order
still lingering in the first transition period: the coach-shaped
railway carriages with luggage piled and corded on top, the red-coated
guard, the little engine tethered well ahead as if between traces. To
those bred within sight of the sea, steamers will always partake in
somewhat of the ``beauty and mystery of the ships''; above all, if
their happy childhood have lain among the gleaming lochs and sinuous
firths of the Western Highlands, where, twice a week maybe, the
strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a piece of the busy,
mysterious outer world. For myself, I probably stand alone in owning
to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing whistle --
judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes. In the
days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the
golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and
wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of
luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles
from certain railway stations, veritable ``horns of Elf-land, faintly
blowing.'' Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a
phantom train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the
journey bit by bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the
grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses
looming up on either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown
leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air
streamed in through the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter;
Endymion-like, ``my first touch of the earth went nigh to kill'': but
it was only to hurry northwards again on the wings of imagination,
from dust and heat to the dear mountain air. ``We are only the
children who might have been,'' murmured Lamb's dream babes to him;
and for the sake of those dream-journeys, the journeys that might have