Laud we the Gods,
  And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
  From our blest altars.

The Romance of the Rail

In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases.  In happier times, three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or if it were not North and South America. ``And there be certaine flitting islands,’’ says one, ``which have been oftentimes seene, and when men approached near them they vanished.’’ ``It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,’’ said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans call the ``getting-off place’’); ``it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.’’ And so on, and so on; each with his special hope or ``wild surmise.’’ There was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles.  And in that first fair world whose men and manners we knew through story-books, before experience taught us far other, the Prince mounts his horse one fine morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning, lo! a new country:  and he rides by fields and granges never visited before, through faces strange to him, to where an unknown King steps down to welcome the mysterious stranger.  And he marries the Princess, and dwells content for many a year; till one day he thinks ``I will look upon my father’s face again, though the leagues be long to my own land.’’ And he rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning he is made welcome at home, where his name has become a dim memory.  Which is all as it should be; for, annihilate time and space as you may, a man’s stride remains the true standard of distance; an eternal and unalterable scale.  The severe horizon, too, repels the thoughts as you gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about, within touch and hail; and the night cometh, when no man can work.

To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities.  Where iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull as the measured beat of the steam-engine.  But the getting back to them is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the making of character.  So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in this second generation of steam.  Pereunt et imputantur; they pass away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers.  For ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast.  The romance of the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed —­ not fully nor worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished