regret; though Emerson for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to immediate recognition as poetic material. ``For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to Nature and the whole —­ re-attaching even artificial things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper insight —­ disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts’’; so that he looks upon ``the factory village and the railway’’ and ``sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider’s geometrical web.’’ The poet, however, seems hard to convince hereof.  Emerson will have it that ``Nature loves the gliding train of cars’’; ``instead of which’’ the poet still goes about the country singing purling brooks.  Painters have been more flexible and liberal.  Turner saw and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its kinship with the elements, and to blend furnace-glare and rush of iron with the storm-shower, the wind and the thwart-flashing sun-rays, and to make the whole a single expression of irresoluble force.  And even in a certain work by another and a very different painter —­ though I willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate romantic intention —­ you shall find the element of romance in the vestiges of the old order still lingering in the first transition period:  the coach-shaped railway carriages with luggage piled and corded on top, the red-coated guard, the little engine tethered well ahead as if between traces.  To those bred within sight of the sea, steamers will always partake in somewhat of the ``beauty and mystery of the ships’’; above all, if their happy childhood have lain among the gleaming lochs and sinuous firths of the Western Highlands, where, twice a week maybe, the strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a piece of the busy, mysterious outer world.  For myself, I probably stand alone in owning to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing whistle —­ judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes.  In the days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles from certain railway stations, veritable ``horns of Elf-land, faintly blowing.’’ Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a phantom train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the journey bit by bit:  through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses looming up on either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air streamed in through the windows.  Return, indeed, was bitter; Endymion-like, ``my first touch of the earth went nigh to kill’’:  but it was only to hurry northwards again on the wings