and ice, like soldiers with the dust of battle upon them.  They had massed their forces, and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a resolution that was epic and grand.  Talk about the railroad dispelling the romance from the landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic element in.  The moving train is a proud spectacle, especially on stormy and tempestuous nights.  When I look out and see its light, steady and unflickering as the planets, and hear the roar of its advancing tread, or its sound diminishing in the distance, I am comforted and made stout of heart.  O night, where is thy stay!  O space, where is thy victory!  Or to see the fast mail pass in the morning is as good as a page of Homer.  It quickens one’s pulse for all day.  It is the Ajax of trains.  I hear its defiant, warning whistle, hear it thunder over the bridges, and its sharp, rushing ring among the rocks, and in the winter mornings see its glancing, meteoric lights, or in summer its white form bursting through the silence and the shadows, its plume of smoke lying flat upon its roofs and stretching far behind,—­a sight better than a battle.  It is something of the same feeling one has in witnessing any wild, free careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or in beholding the charge of an army; or in listening to an eloquent man, or to a hundred instruments of music in full blast,—­it is triumph, victory.  What is eloquence but mass in motion,—­a flood, a cataract, an express train, a cavalry charge?  We are literally carried away, swept from our feet, and recover our senses again as best we can.

I experienced the same emotion when I saw them go by with the sunken steamer.  The procession moved slowly and solemnly.  It was like a funeral cortege,—­a long line of grim floats and barges and boxes, with their bowed and solemn derricks, the pall-bearers; and underneath in her watery grave, where she had been for six months, the sunken steamer, partially lifted and borne along.  Next day the procession went back again, and the spectacle was still more eloquent.  The steamer had been taken to the flats above and raised till her walking-beam was out of water; her bell also was exposed and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers’ Herculean labor seemed nearly over.  But that night the winds and the storms held high carnival.  It looked like preconcerted action on the part of tide, tempest, and rain to defeat these wreckers, for the elements all pulled together and pulled till cables and hawser snapped like threads.  Back the procession started, anchors were dragged or lost, immense new cables were quickly taken ashore and fastened to trees; but no use:  trees were upturned, the cables stretched till they grew small and sang like harp-strings, then parted; back, back against the desperate efforts of the men, till within a few feet of her old grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft, floats were overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers were snapped like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the air, the steamer plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of water.