as fast as their domestic servants become in- | dependent. Both parties will gain by this change; and the new generation will grow up to improved dwellings as their natural state of existence, far in advance of that of their fathers and mothers. Precisely as the Brougham carriage, with one horse and one man, has replaced the cumbrous old vehicle, with its two men and two horses, and made the rider more independent, so will the improved dwelling, with its diminished personal wants, take the place of the old inconvenient house. But where are we to find sites for these improved dwellings and gardens for working men? will be asked by a host of objectors. Where do you find sites for your workhouses? will be our reply. Are they not all going out of town, under the new system? If you want garden land, go to the borders of the new working men's parks in Manchester, or of the new Victoria-park, in London. Go to the railways, east, west, north, and south, and find sites along their borders. On this question we have yet much to say. We have now run through the four minor questions relating to Physical Man and his progress-Food, Fuel, Clothing, and Lodging; clearly indicating the steps by which we think it probable that he will eradicate physical evil in conformity with the laws of nature, who has provided a constant succession of new circumstances in accordance with the growth of his knowledge and power, from the form of the ferocious wild animal up to the likeness of an angel. And herein a great work will have been achieved, though we shall be met at this point by numerous objectors, who hold so strongly to the progress of man's mind, that they forget his body is a basis-a temple, wherein his mind must dwell. Following up these objectors to the extreme, we should arrive at asceticism; we should pull down our baths and wash-houses, for they are but a portion of the labor bestowed upon our bodies. Fairly meeting these objectors, we should subject them to a test. We would say to each one -What is your own personal limit of comfort and convenience; what kind of house do inhabit; what food do you eat; what kind of clothing do you wear; what do you possess of refinement or embellishment in works of art? Cease, then, your objections to physical ease and comfort, till every human being is at least as well provided as yourself with the things that God has given you od ends. If you deny this, you will lie open to the reproach of seeking to keep others poor in order to appropriate to yourself. If you preach poverty, at least practice your preaching. We ourselves believe poverty to be an evil;-wealth, as the name imports, in its high sense of weal, to be a good. From poverty-in other words, from ignorance-spring countless evils; from wealth, rightly applied, innumerable goods. One of our most earnest modern writers, the author of "Modern Painters," has written in his work some sentences capable of misapprehension on this point. We approach him with a reverential feeling, for his power and love of truth, and we would fain hope that we have misunderstood him. But we cannot let it pass unnoticed, for others may read it wrongly also, if we have so done; and it were pity that such a mind should fail to take hold of the mass, or be held as an ascetic teacher of bygone times, a stern taskmaster of the present seeking to renew the temple-building of the past ages with the sweat of modern brows; leaving the laborer in his unwholesome hovel, while the priest inhabits a palace; teaching him to worship God in temples made with hands, while he himself has but a wretched hut to cover him. As in Egypt, the pyramid for the priest, the cavern for the worshiper. We stop to extract : "And yet people speak, in this working age, and land, and food, and raiment, were alone usewhen they speak from their hearts, as if houses, ful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration, were all profitless; so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew, and the water they draw, are tains like the shadow of God, and than the great better than the pine-forests that cover the mounrivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that though God hath made everything beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.' "This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the faith; but now, when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem arising out of the rest,-evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also-a fear greater than of sword and sedition--that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water sure; that gratitude to Him may cease, because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words, and | foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity | of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colors its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust. And though I believe we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial, in all directions however distant. And at this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea; when their great sagene is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength of England together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms, and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufacture; when there is not a monument throughout the cities of Europe, that speaks of old years and mighty people, but is being swept away to build cafes and gaming-houses; when the honor of God is thought to consist in the poverty of his temple and the column is shortened, and the pinnacle shattered, the color denied to the casement, and the marble to the altar-while exchequers are exhausted in luxury of boudoirs, and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without a pause all the loveliness of a creation which God in giving pronounced good, and destroy without a thought all those labors which men have given their lives, and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail; there is need, bitter need, to bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to know Him by whom we live, and that he is not to be known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of his influences upon his creatures, not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovations, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which he gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty, he did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might give the carved, work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer; he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; he brings not up his quails by the east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; he has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven. "All science, and all art, may be divided into that which is subservient to life, and which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful. As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in the common sense, useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art, is that between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to greater, so that the socalled useless part of each profession, does by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind, assume the superior and more noble place, even though books be sometimes written, and that by writers of no ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for the years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of refining sugar, and date the eminence of the philosopher, whose life has been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from the time of his inventing an improvement in spectacles. "But the common consent of men proves and accepts the proposition, that whatever part of any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and admits of material uses, is ignoble, and whatsoever part is addressed to the mind only is noble; and that geology does better in re-clothing dry bones, and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven, than in teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure than in expressing juices; surgery better in investigating organization, than in setting limbs ; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in the more exalted range of science adds something also to its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desires as the imperfection of their nature may admit; that the strong torrents which, in their own gladness, fill the hills with hollow thunder, and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear; that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring, and that for our incitement-I say not our reward-for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and stars their times." This is speech as from the lips of a prophet, -grandly expressed and purposeful in its meaning. Yet, of a surety, has Ruskin lived in the halls of the high and powerful only to have gathered up this meaning at this age of the world. Of kindred feeling was Coleridge, thinking of the proud ones of the earth, when he penned the lines "Oh, lady! nursed in pomp and pleasure, Where learned you that heroic measure?" It is not so, John Ruskin; the workers of this world, this our English world, are not mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. The contracted utilitarian abuse of doctrine that followed on the announcement of the philosopher, passed away after but a short lapse of time, and was no more. It is the instinct of God that prompts the modern worker in his course, as surely as it prompts the preacher. The brave and heroic worker, faithful to his appointed task, even he whom men call "Navvy," the stern old Saxon stock, who, like his ancestry of the race of the Vikingr, works out the mystic ways of Providence, that the bread of physical life shall be placed in the mouths of himself and his brethren ;-he perchance knows not, or heeds not, the command, "that man shall not live by bread alone;" suffice it for him that man cannot live without bread. | bodies of men, women, and children: while "The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods I teach Iowa Saxon art." All these uses the pine serves while man is in his infancy. When he shall grow up into full and ripened manhood, with the progress of art the pine may remain in its native forest unharmed, "to cover the mountains like the shadows of God." Years ago a party of engineers were walking through the grounds of Woburn Abbey. All were suddenly struck with the magnificent form of a large pine-tree, and stood still "Parson!" cried out a fen farmer to a man saying nothing, lost in admiration of its beauof God in black garments, "why don't 'e putty as a tree. One of the number at length, souls into the congregation?"-the laboring peasantry. "Souls!" replied the preacher, turning an eye of indignation on the hard man-" Souls, without bodies! Find you the bodies with fitting wages, and I will undertake to raise the souls. I cannot create souls in starving bodies!" No! no! not in our day must the reproach be raised that we work too much, while Dorsetshire laborers starve, and hungry dogs in Skibbereen devour the unburied strong in his art or artistry, his second nature burst out into speech, "What a splendid water-wheel shaft that tree would make!" Years have rolled away, and water-wheel shafts are now all made of iron. The pine-tree may grow and flourish forever, undisturbed by the engineer. Nature has taught him the uses of inorganic matter. Not even from the lips of Ruskin can we patiently listen to the vituperation of railways-the modern Acts of the Apostles of that make the rough places smooth, and struggling forward, dazzled by turns, but still struggling that future and through it w rush to win for humanity a place for centuries yet to com The proposition that the "us of man is to be witness of the glo to advance that glory by his rea ence and resultant happiness, good of man as a civilized being the savage or partly savage st are savages of pseudo-civilizat of the forest. And thought and women too, who love the " er more for its sweet hives tha ple hues," who think "the mea the life, the raiment than the b gard the earth as a stable and fodder; who love the corn t the fruit they crush better tha of the angels on the slopes of they also are men and women, tian soul shall not cast them o ernacle. Men with bodies and are the germ of men with mind we complain that men with seek bodily pleasure; shall w those pleasures, as well as the ures, are not of God's ordin were the acts of preserving an the species made sources of p ure, save to increase man's progress on earth? That whi as a reward cannot be regard debasing. Were a human b passions or appetites, he were s man being. Doubtless, "sight, admiration" are the highest of o and it is debasing in those cap to be unduly swayed by sensual But, with the huge mass of m without these high attributes, different-denial of such coars as they are fitted for would in in many cases, evil passions in thought, and admiration are t of cultivated men; but woe fo were the assumption acted on, pleasures should be permitted. human beings whose nerves are as tightened parchments on drum yield no vibration without beat others there are, whose finelyvibrate to every breath of air-qu ure and as quick to pain. Men eat who cannot live to think; Hybla may be sweet on their pal offending those who have eyes heather's purple hue; the spirit may excite their blood without disturbing the sense of hearing in those who delight in harmony of "sweet noise," and Dutch form may satisfy their coarser sense of woman's beauty, and leave unsoiled the hallowed imaginations of those who dream only of the Madonna's purity. God meant all his creatures to be happy-and commerce itself would grow to be a crime-being mainly based on the supply of sensual necessities-were the position established, that the gratification of the senses is a degradation. No, no! beautiful senses, refined, not weakened by art, are the precursors of mental excellence, of divine spirit. The Persian worships the sun as the external symbol of all beauty of light and heat. It is a sensual worship, but it is "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." And after all, sight is but a slight removal from hearing and taste. The senses five are but varieties of one sense, touch-physical action on the various nerves by whose agency our bodies are so constituted as to form fitting abiding places for our minds. Take a fine human being of the highest physical attributes, and with a mind proportioned to them-then destroy in succession his various nerves of sight, of scent, of taste, of hearing, of touch—and the brain, the root of these nerves, the deposit, the storehouse of ideas, the fountain of thought, will dry up and wither; and mind will be no more. Take away sight, hearing, and touch, and even speech will gradually cease. Better, then, is it to have sensual appetites, indicating the possession of nerves that may be refined, than to be devoid of senses. Better is the Sybarite couch, than the gory bed of Better even the alderman's feast than the abhorred squalor of Skibbereen. Better the soulless orgie than the sea-fight. Better, far better, the reclining festival, the flowerwreathed wine-cup, the witching dancing girl of the Greek, or Roman, or modern Asiatic, than the ascetic sternness of the monk, the self-glorifying privation of the Simon. Stylites. Better the epicurean, keeping his nerves in pleasurable sensation, when without injury to others, than the miserable stoic, gratifying his miserable vanity, without benefit to any one, and destroying his own frame by physical privation. war. It requires a strong moral sense to look at the new things acting before us, surrounded as they are by iniquities, and yet to discern clearly the good that is in them. We see Hudsons, and Capel Courts, and Stock Exchanges, with all manner of unclean things floating on the surface of railways, and we VOL. XIX. NO. I. We will endeavor to answer, to show that "the great sagene of the iron roads, is drawing the ancient power and strength of England together; its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart," for no narrow finite calculating metropolis of manufactures," but for the highest work of the civilization of universal man; for his rescue from the thraldom of misery, and poverty, and ignorance, that man, universal man, may become the lord of all the earth, and not a miserable quarrelsome assemblage of clans, ravaging each other's possessions like ferocious beasts. We deliberately throw down our gauntlet to the vituperators of railways, and will deal with their charges in succession, if, indeed, upon searching, we can find any specific charges. First-It is asserted that railways are ugly. We admit it-while they are new. But so are all new constructions; new buildings of stone or brick are garish and ugly; so are new earthen banks till nature has clad them in green. New sandstone cuttings, new chalk cuttings are ugly. But this is only till they are overgrown with trees, and plants, and lichens, and herbage, and evergreens; the railway ravine, with its sweeping curve, is beautiful as a natural ravine. The South Western Railway, in some portions, is especially beautiful. "The heath, the heath -- the upland heath, With the pine ridge on the height; And all below the purple wreath, Gleaming in rich sunlight; And the sweeping curve of the glancing rail, * * * * * O'er the gladdened earth's surface are whirled, By the iron steeds' stride, o'er the forest so wide, From the wilderness winning a world." the cuttings, and nature will soon make them Turf the railway embankments, and plant beautiful enough. The road-bridges above jects, if not in building, by planting them them may always be rendered sightly obout, and covering them with ivy and other climbers. The stations, we agree, should not be architectural. In great towns they should be simply business-like; in short, 2 * Now Mrs. Browning. |