Shakspeare is said, in those noted lines,—­

  “Dear as the ruddy drops
  That visit this sad heart,”

to have anticipated the discovery of the circulation of the blood:  did not the writers of the Oriental stories foresee rail and telegraph, and describe them in their own tropical style?

It is often said, that, although medical science leaves us pretty much as it found us with regard to the days of the years of our pilgrimage, and has as yet, with all its discoveries, done little towards prolonging “this pleasing, anxious being,” yet the material improvements of our day do in effect lengthen mortal life for us.  And truly, what must Indian life have been worth, when it took a month to cut down a tree with a stone hatchet, and when the shaping of a canoe was the work of a year?  When two hundred miles of travel consumed a week’s time, every two hundred miles’ journey was worth a week’s life; and if we accept the idea of a certain celebrated character, (not “Quintus Curtius,” but Geoffrey Crayon, I believe,) that the time we spend in journeying is just so much subtracted from our little span of days, what a fearful loss of life must have resulted from our old modes of locomotion!  And yet we inconsiderately grumble at an occasional smash-up!  So easily are we spoiled!

There are grave doubts, however, in some minds, whether our present celerity of travel be wholly a gain upon the old methods.  It must depend upon circumstances.  If agreeable people virtually live longer now, so do bores, cheats, slanderers, hypocrites, and people who eat onions and chew tobacco; and the rail enables these to pursue their victims with inevitable, fatal swiftness.

Some hold that the pleasure of travelling is even impaired by this increase of speed.  There is such a thing as fatal facility.  As well eat a condensed dinner, or hear a concert in one comprehensive crash, ear-splitting and soul-confounding, as see miles of landscape at a glance.  Willis says, travelling on an English railway is equivalent to having so many miles of green damask unrolled before your weary eyes.  And one may certainly have too much of a good thing.

But, instead of discussing railroads in general,—­too grand a theme for me,—­let me say that nobody can persuade me it is not delightful to fly over ground scarcely yet trodden by the foot of man; to penetrate, with the most subtle resources of inventive art, the recesses in which Nature has enshrined herself most privately,—­her dressing-room, as it were, where we find her in her freshness, before man-milliners have marred her beauty by attempts at improvement.  The contrast between that miracle of art, a railroad-train at full speed, and a wide, lonely prairie, or a dusky forest, leafless, chilly, and silent,—­save for the small tinkling of streams beginning to break from their frosty limits,—­is one of the most striking in all the wide range of rural effects.  It reminds me, though perhaps unaccountably to some, of Browning’s fine image,—­