"Some of them do," said Lydia; "but they are not the artists of our
generation; and those who take up their cry are no better than
parrots. If every holiday recollection of my youth, every escape
from town to country, be associated with the railway, I must feel
towards it otherwise than did my father, upon whose middle age it
came as a monstrous iron innovation. The locomotive is one of the
wonders of modern childhood. Children crowd upon a bridge to see the
train pass beneath. Little boys strut along the streets puffing and
whistling in imitation of the engine. All that romance, silly as it
looks, becomes sacred in afterlife. Besides, when it is not
underground in a foul London tunnel, a train is a beautiful thing.
Its pure, white fleece of steam harmonizes with every variety of
landscape. And its sound! Have you ever stood on a sea-coast skirted
by a railway, and listened as the train came into hearing in the far
distance? At first it can hardly be distinguished from the noise of
the sea; then you recognize it by its vibration; one moment
smothered in a deep cutting, and the next sent echoing from some
hillside. Sometimes it runs smoothly for many minutes, and then
breaks suddenly into a rhythmic clatter, always changing in distance
and intensity. When it comes near, you should get into a tunnel, and
stand there while it passes. I did that once, and it was like the
last page of an overture by Beethoven--thunderingly impetuous. I
cannot conceive how any person can hope to disparage a train by
comparing it with a stage-coach; and I know something of
stage-coaches--or, at least, of diligences. Their effect on the men
employed about them ought to decide the superiority of steam without
further argument. I have never observed an engine-driver who did not
seem an exceptionally intelligent mechanic, while the very writers
and artists who have preserved the memory of the coaching days for