"moved along, Instinct with motion; by what wondrous skill Compact, no human tongue could tell, Nor human wit devise?" persecution. In 1825, the Quarterly Review thus ridiculed the notion of certain engineers, Telford amongst the number, that a railway engine could go Did he contemplate the union of safety and speed, eighteen or twenty miles an hour: "The gross exagwhen he wrote, "Steady and swift the self-moved chariot went?" Did he prefigure the mighty tunnels of our day, when he said "Their way was through the adamantine rock: Its massive walls arose, and overhead Southey had no such visions: but he had somewhat of that universal sense called poetry, in this case adopted from the legends that have been told to the listening wonder of the oldest races of the world; and his imaginative creations were, in these particulars of mystic sublimity, the realities of this our age, falsely called prosaic. Wherever there is power, there is poetry. The tread of a mighty army is poetry; the rush of an engine that breaks down the barriers of mountains and rivers, and annihilates distance, is poetry. There is poetry in the wind that scatters, and the lightning that blasts; nor is there less poetry in the little bark that outrides the storm. There is poetry in the brave man who teaches his suffering fellows to put down oppression; there is poetry in the good man who stands up against the wildest buffets of fate with an equal mind. Poetry is not the exclusive property of any age, or any class, or any locality. Manchester has its poetry, as much as Loch Katrine. We admit that Roger North was not thinking of poetry when he described a Newcastle railway in 1680: "Another thing, that is remarkable, is their way-leaves; for when men have pieces of ground between the colliery and the river, they sell leave to lead coals over their ground; and so dear that the owner of a rood of ground will expect 20l. per annum for this leave. The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber, from the colliery down to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails; whereby the carriage is so easy, that one horse will draw down four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal merchant." Who would have thought that this contrivance would have led to no large results till a hundred and fifty years had passed away? Who could Who could have believed that "the rails of timber, exactly straight and parallel," and the "bulky carts with four rowlets exactly fitting the rails," would have changed the face, and to a great degree the destinies, of the world? When Jacquard, the inventor of the wonderful loom that bears his name, was arrested and carried to Paris, with his machine, Carnot, in the presence of Napoleon, roughly said to him, "Are you the man that pretends to do that impossibility-to tie a knot in a stretched string?" His compatriots of Lyons, the impossibility being surmounted, broke his machines in 1806, and raised a statue to his memory in 1840. All those who are in advance of public opinion must bear ridicule or gerations of the powers of the locomotive steam engine, or, to speak plain English, the steam carriage, may delude for a time, but must end in the mortification of those concerned. . . . . We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate." In that year, the common belief was that railways were altogether delusions and impositions. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opposed in Parliament with every form of invective. One member, in 1825, declared his opinion “that a railway could not enter into successful competition with a canal. Even with the best locomotive engine the average rate would be but three miles and a half per hour, which was slower than the canal conveyance." (Hansard, 2nd series, vol. iv. p. 853.) Another assertion, which Mr. Huskisson was obliged to meet doubtfully and apologetically, was, "that there were two or three canals which were sufficient for every purpose of commerce in the districts through which the railway was to pass." Let us be just to what we have been accustomed to decry as the dark ages. Let us be tolerant to those who imprisoned Galileo, and rewarded Columbus with chains. If there be a reality in any discovery-a true thing, and not a sham,—if there be strength, or utility, or beauty, in any work of mind,—it will live and fructify, whatever critics, or orators, or inquisitors, or even kings, may do to crush it. And so it is with railways. On the 15th September, 1830, the first passenger line, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, was opened. The conveyance of passengers appears originally to have been an inferior consideration to the conveyance of goods; and the Directors modestly anticipated that one half of the passengers travelling by coaches between the two towns might venture on the railway. In the first year after the opening, 1831, there were conveyed four hundred and forty-five thousand passengers; in the year ending 1st July, 1845, the passengers so conveyed amounted to eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand. On this 24th April, 1847, there has been a total expended on the railways of the United Kingdom, of seventy-eight millions sterling; and in the last week the aggregate receipt upon these railways was one hundred and sixty thousand pounds, being a total exceeding eight millions sterling per annum, for the conveyance of passengers and goods. To attempt anything like a connected view of the existing railway system of our land, would be to embarrass our readers with details which are constantly changing. There is scarcely a week passes in which new railways are not opened. They lead not now to marts of commerce alone. They take us amongst mountains and lakes, the margins of the broad sea, and the banks of the smiling rivers. John Wilsona name never to be uttered by the lover of nature and natural things without a grateful homage-tells us in his beautiful lines in a "Highland Glen," "Yea! long as Nature's humblest child Hath kept her temple undefiled By sinful sacrifice, Earth's fairest scenes are all his own, He is a monarch, and his throne It is for the humblest children of Nature that we especially rejoice, when "Earth's fairest scenes" are for the first time opened to their view, by the marvellous inventions of our own age. Grudge not, ye poets of the wild glens and the solemn lakes, that unaccustomed crowds come to gaze upon your solitudes. Yourselves are the greatest amongst the powers that have carried them thither. Ye have scattered your thoughts amidst the multitude; and your disciples are come to worship in the temples ye have consecrated. Steam-boats and railways are completing the work which ye have begun. To the genius of Watt and of Wordsworth we may indifferently say, "Thou hast to those in populous city pent As we draw towards the close of this desultory paper, the magnificence of the railway system presents itself to our minds in a dreamy vastness that forbids any systematic attempt to follow it out to its ultimate tendencies. View it in connexion with the arrangements of the Post-office. "Ride for your life-haste, haste, post-haste,"—were the commands of ambitious peers and crafty ministers in the days of Elizabeth, to the unhappy courier who was to post from London to Edinburgh. Onward he went, through miry ways and over trackless commons,-sometimes dashing up to his saddle-bows through a ford swollen by mountain rains-sometimes bewildered in the mists of the trackless moorlands. As he approaches the borders new terrors await him. He rides in the dim morning twilight, with his ears alive to every sound. He fancies that the tread of horses and of cattle is at hand. He dares not hide himself, for he would be mistaken for a spy. He rides boldly on into the troop of marchers who are returning from their foray; and, to his surprise, is permitted to escape, after he has been saluted with a few words of opprobrium, and a snatch of the ballad of Johnnie Armstrong. At last he reaches "Edina, Scotia's darling seat," after a perilous journey of five days. His despatches are brought forth from their hiding-place;—the great men meet and deliberate ;— and after a tarrying of a day or two, the express has to face again the same rough road. Take the Postoffice arrangements between London and Edinburghnot yet carried out with all the railroad power that will belong to them in a few months,-and mark what they now do for the humblest in the land. We have somewhere seen it recorded, that the mail-bag from London to Edinburgh once arrived with a single letter. The penny co-operation of thousands now places a ton of northern letters in a carriage at Euston-square, at a quarter before nine at night. Away rushes the mighty train by hill and champaign. The herds in the pastures heed not its accustomed thunder;-the villagers sleep on in defiance of the whistle. Ever and anon a bag is dropped at some solitary station; or there is a short parley at the more important stations of city and town. The passengers slumber; or, looking forth over the moon-lit country, sometimes trace the silver thread of a gentle river, or the lurid glare of a smoking furnace. Onward it sweeps, till the morning breaks, and the solemn towers of York are gilded with the first sunbeam. A short pause, and away for Newcastle. Then comes, for awhile, the aid of the road to Berwick; and then again the railway to Edinburgh. In twentytwo hours, even with the change from one mode of conveyance to another-with absolute certainty-the letter that costs one penny is transmitted to its destination in a fifth of the time, and at a five-thousandth part of the cost, of the express that once bore the mandates of the great ones of the earth. It is a lesson for the feebleness of individual pride to take to its heart, and think how many things which solitary man still boasts of as his exclusive own, will crumble into nothingness before the power of association. The merchants of Manchester have complained to the Directors of the London and North Western Railway, that the newspapers of London, which are published at six o'clock in the morning, do not reach them till the late hour of three in the afternoon. And they have a right to complain. It is no answer to their complaint to point to the times when the same merchants did not receive the letters which left London at eight o'clock at night, until three in the following afternoon. That antique state of things is within the memory even of the young; and the remembrance is still green of the early dinner at the snug villa; the hurrying to the counting-house; the labour till a late hour of the evening; the ride home in dreary darkness. The daily movements of the great commercial body of Manchester were then under the absolute regulation of the Post, and that regulation was not of the most 'conve nient. A great revolution is effected. The London letters, the Scotch letters, the correspondence of the world, now wait lovingly upon the earliest industry of the merchant of Manchester. A mighty power has been working for him while he has slept. He is brought into more intimate contact with all his compatriots. His actions are not now to be postponed to one day later than the actions of the metropolis. He claims his right to a simultaneous movement. He has been freed from the trammels of space in a wonderful degree; he struggles to make his emancipation more perfect. Distance indeed! Has not the Indian mail arrived in thirty days; and shall Manchester be nine hours behind London, in knowing what it brings? It is the same principle which now regulates our intercourse of friendship and of family affection. We breakfast in the suburbs of the capital with the cheerfulness of the domestic hearth around us; a long journey is before us; there is a slight pang when we feel that an inexorable power will that same evening separate us by three hundred miles from those | empty the arsenals of Woolwich upon Southampton, we love, and set us down on the banks of the Tyne, or Brighton, or Hastings, or Folkstone,-with a coastor by the Solway Frith, a solitary. It may be a line uninterruptedly communicating with London as a childish feeling in the eyes of the young; but we who common centre? No, no. The Land we live in said, have lived in the sober days of seven miles an hour "Come, if you dare," in the days before steam had cannot quite throw it off. Happy is it that the iden- remodelled its communications. The first pulsation tical power which so suddenly interposes its almost of the electric telegraph that proclaimed a hostile impossible distance between us and our household fleet in the Channel would have an answering movesympathies, brings its own wondrous consolations- ment from the Admiralty, that would make the island separates and unites in the same day. We rest for throb to its remotest extremities. Invade a country twelve hours after our rush of three hundred miles; that could collect the sturdiest of its population upon and during those twelve hours there has been a winged any given point within eight-and-forty hours, and messenger travelling towards us, to make us feel that provide them with all the materials of war in half the we are not alone,-that strange faces may look upon same time! The thing is too ludicrous! The colliers us, but that "the old familiar faces" are still greeting of Northumberland could be whirled from the north to us wherever we move. We know that they are close the south by the fuel that their sturdy hands have around us, when no distance can separate our written brought to the surface; and they alone would be a host thoughts even for a day. A single word of home to sweep the aggressor from our earth. news, a single touch of home feeling, holds us together. We drag not "at each remove a lengthening chain" of anxiety and "hope deferred." Separationreal separation of thought and interest,-is not to be spoken of in a land, where science and commercial energy have rendered the all-penetrating influence of the Post rapid as the winds, certain as the alternations of light and darkness. If it were possible to use the Railway for the conveyance of our persons, while our letters travelled by the Road, who would not exclaim, "Chaos is come again!" The transit from Newcastle to Edinburgh now offers one of the few remaining links of rail and coach upon direct and great lines. To our minds these memorials of our transition state are singularly interesting. But under any future condition of railway extension, the iron power can never accomplish its work alone. Its great natural allies are the road, the river, and the sea. It must work in conjunction with the coach and the steam-boat; and each, under a judicious system, has the capacity of equal extension. We have, with all the vast expenditure upon railways, only about two thousand five hundred miles; the number will probably be doubled in five years. But we have twenty-five thousand miles of turnpike-roads that are to be fed with passengers, and goods, and letters, and newspapers, from the great veins and arteries of the railways. Every year and every month makes the alliance more perfect. The remotest village is brought closer and closer to the capital and the great towns. The news of the abdication of James II. was three months reaching the Orkneys. How soon would the rail, the coach, and the steam-ship tell the bold descendants of the sea-kings to gird on their swords, if a foreign foe should dare to plant his foot on British soil! Invasion! it is a joke. Invasion! Open the map of England, and show the spot from the North Foreland to the Land's End, where an army of a hundred thousand men could not be gathered in four-and-twenty hours. Look, especially, at the most accessible coast -the coast where Cæsar landed his legions, and Horsa his rabble. How many hours would it require to But the Railway has its real work to do-not a hypothetical work like this, of grappling with shadowy giants. It has to raise the condition of all those who for centuries have lived remote from the nourishing influences of our growing civilization. Rustic innocence and rustic happiness have been found out to be dreams of an age that never existed. The seats of ignorance are in the villages where never mail-horn has been heard. There live the bondmen, as much bound to the soil as the villains of the fourteenth century-bondmen without the sustenance of bondmen. The railway and the steam-boat, by opening markets, by saving cost of transit, assist the accumulation of agricultural capital. That capital cannot be better employed than in the calling forth of skilled labour. Let labour circulate, and it must become skilled. Pen it up in hamlets, and it continues the mechanical, hopeless, dangerous thing it is now in its uncultivated state. The noblest sight that a Railway can furnish is, to our minds, not the equal adoption of its advantages by the rich classes and the commercial classes— by the bishop travelling to his see and the mill-owner returning to his spindles; but by the smock-frocked agricultural labourer, whistling in the short course of his sixpenny ride-a free man, who is not bound to his parish, but has found employment for his labour where it is better paid than in the parish where the wages of labour are doled out, not to the most skilful, but to the most burthensome. The great work for all of us to work at the great work which all our vast mechanical improvements have a tendency to facilitate-is that of raising the standard of comfort and intelligence. The road and the railway are the tracks in which the highest civilization must, in our generation, march to its triumphs over ignorance and misery. Thus, then, we have glanced over one branch of the large subject of our country's communications. The other branch, our mastery of the waters, will form a second paper. We shall then be free to roam about "The Land we live in," and endeavour to carry our readers along 66 with us, wherever the works of Nature or of Man present worthy subjects for the pen and the pencil. To explain our purposed course we repeat a passage of our Prospectus :-The Poet of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" looked upon the picturesque features of the external world as we may look to gather the materials of our unpretending prose; glancing from "russetlawns," and "mountains," and "meadows trim," and "rivers wide," to "towers and battlements," "cities," and "the busy hum of men :" then turning to some wide water'd shore," or to " arched walks of twilight groves;" then lingering in the "studious cloister's pale," or beneath "the high embowed roof" of the dim cathedral. But we have also to look upon many things, some of which are scarcely picturesque, some wholly modern, but which have the elements of gran 66 deur in their vastness and their moral influences. The courts and offices of government, legislation, and the administration of justice; the halls of science, art, and letters; the seats of education; the emporiums of commerce and manufactures; the havens of maritime power; the material improvements of our day viewed in connexion with the moral; the manners and social characteristics of the people. All these features, and many more which it is better here to suggest than enumerate, make up the wonderful whole of "The Land we live in." Be it our aim to seize upon the most permanent and most universal of these features; in the desire to amuse as well as to inform,-to advance all safe and benevolent progress,-to nourish a just patriotism. |