shown for many years past by the working
of the corps of Sappers and Miners, and the
idea upon which it was founded has been
further acted upon during the last months
by the despatch of railway labourers to the
Crimea. It is not simply of fighting men
that a perfectly organised army ought in
these days to consist. The formation of the
corps of Royal Sappers and Miners was the
first official recognition of the fact; other
recognitions of it, doubtless, are to follow.

POETRY ON THE RAILWAY.

IF I succeed in the object I have proposed
to myself in this paper, I shall consider that
I am entitled to the gratitude of all poets,
present and to come. For I shall have found
them a new subject for verse: a discovery, I
submit, as important as that of a new metal,
or of a new motive power, a new pleasure, a
new pattern for shawls, a new colour, or a
new strong drink. No member of the tuneful
craft; no gentleman whose eyes are in the
habit of rolling in a fine frenzy; no
sentimental young lady with an album will deny
that the whole present domain of poetry
is used up: that it has been surveyed,
travelled over, explored, ticketed, catalogued,
classified, and analysed to the last inch of
ground, to the last petal of the last flower, to
the last blade of grass. Every poetical
subject has been worn as threadbare as Sir John
Cutler's stockings. The sea, its blueness,
depth, vastness, raininess, freedom, noisiness,
calmness, darkness, and brightness; its
weeds, and waves, and finny denizens; its
laughter, wailings, sighings, and deep bellowings;
the ships that sail, and the boats that
dance, and the tempests that howl over it;
the white winged birds that skim over its
billows; the great whales, and sharks, and
monsters, to us yet unknown, that disport
themselves in its lowest depths, and swinge
the scaly horrors of their folded tails in its
salt hiding places; the mermaids that wag
their tails and comb their tresses in its coral
caves; the sirens that sing fathoms farther
than plummet ever sounded; the jewels and
gold that lie hidden in its caverns, measureless
to man; the dead that it is to give up:—the
sea, and all appertaining to it, have been sung
dry these thousand years. We heard the
roar of its billows in the first line of the Iliad,
and Mr. Sharp, the comic singer, will sing
about it this very night at the Tivoli
Gardens, in connection with the Gravesend
steamer, the steward, certain basins, and a
boiled leg of mutton.

As for the Sun, he has had as many verses
out him as he is miles distant from
the earth. His heat, brightness, roundness,
and smiling face; his incorrigible propensities
for getting up in the east and going to
bed in the west; his obliging disposition in
tipping the hills with gold, and bathing the
evening sky with crimson, have all been sung.
Every star in the firmament has had a stanza;
Saturn's rings have all had their posies, and
Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, and Virorum, have all
been chanted. As for the poor illused Moon,
she has been ground on every barrel-organ in
Parnassus since poetry existed. Her pallid
complexion, chastity or lightness of conduct,
treacherous, contemplative, or secretive
disposition, her silver or sickly smile, have all
been over-celebrated in verse. And everything
else belonging to the sky—the clouds,
murky, purple, or silver lined, the hail, the
rain, the snow, the rainbow, the wind in its
circuits, the fowls that fly, and the insects that
hover—they have all had their poets, and too
many of them.

Is there anything new in poetry, I ask, to be
said about Love? Surely that viand has been
done to rags. We have it with every variety of
dressing. Love and madness; love and smiles,
tears, folly, crime, innocence, and charity. We
have had love in a village, a palace, a cottage, a
camp, a prison, and a tub. We have had the
loves of pirates, highwaymen, lords and ladies,
shepherds and shepherdesses; the Loves of
the Angels and the Loves of the New Police.
Canning was even good enough to impress
the abstruse science of mathematics into
the service of Poetry and Love; and to
sing about the loves of ardent axioms,
postulates, tangents, oscillation, cissoids, conchoids,
the square of the hypothenuse, asymptotes,
parabolas, and conic sections—in short, all the
Loves of the Triangles. Doctor Darwin gave
us the Loves of the Plants, and in the economy
of vegetation we had the loves of granite
rocks, argillaceous strata, noduled flints, blue
clay, silica, chertz, and the limestone formation.
We have had in connection with love
in poetry hearts, darts, spells, wrath, despair,
withering smiles, burning tears, sighs, roses,
posies, pearls and other precious stones;
blighted hopes, beaming eyes, misery,
wretchedness, and unutterable woe. It is too much.
Every thing is worn out. The whole of the
flowergarden, from the brazen sunflower to the timid
violet, has been exhausted long ago. All the
birds in the world could never sing so loud or so
long as the poets have sung about them. The
bards have sung right through Lemprière's
Classical Dictionary, Buffon's Natural History,
Malte Brun's Geography (for what country,
city, mountain, or stream, remains unsung),
and the Biographie Universelle. Every hero,
and almost every scoundrel, has had his
epic. We have had the poetical Pleasures of
Hope, Memory, Imagination, and Friendship;
likewise the Vanity of Human Wishes, the
Fallacies of Hope, and the Triumphs of
Temper. The heavenly muse has sung of
man's first disobedience, and the mortal fruit
of the forbidden tree, that brought Death into
the world and all our woes. The honest muse
has arisen and sung the Man of Ross. All
the battles that ever were fought—all the
arms and all the men—have been celebrated
in numbers. Arts, commerce, laws, learning,