smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have
been too scanty for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make
our fire in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some half a dozen
sticks of wood between dawn and nightfall.

I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said
that the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and
there and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting
the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.
The domestic fire was a type of all these attributes, and seemed to
bring might and majesty, and wild nature and a spiritual essence,
into our in most home, and yet to dwell with us in such friendliness
that its mysteries and marvels excited no dismay. The same mild
companion that smiled so placidly in our faces was he that comes
roaring out of AEtna and rushes madly up the sky like a fiend
breaking loose from torment and fighting for a place among the upper
angels. He it is, too, that leaps from cloud to cloud amid the
crashing thunder-storm. It was he whom the Gheber worshipped with no
unnatural idolatry; and it was he who devoured London and Moscow and
many another famous city, and who loves to riot through our own dark
forests and sweep across our prairies, and to whose ravenous maw, it
is said, the universe shall one day be given as a final feast.
Meanwhile he is the great artisan and laborer by whose aid men are
enabled to build a world within a world, or, at least, to smooth
down the rough creation which Nature flung to its. He forges the
mighty anchor and every lesser instrument; he drives the steamboat
and drags the rail-car; and it was he--this creature of terrible
might, and so many-sided utility and all-comprehensive
destructiveness--that used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our
wintry days, and whom we have made the prisoner of this iron cage.