and our old nobility, have had their poet.
Suicide has found a member of the Court of
Apollo musical and morbid enough to sing
self-murder; and the Corn Laws have been
rescued from Blue Books, and enshrined in
Ballads. Mr. Pope has called upon my lord
Bolingbroke to awake, and " expatiate free
o'er all this scene of man;" and the pair have,
together, passed the whole catalogue of human
virtues and vices in review. Drunkenness
has been sung; so has painting, so has music.
Poems have been written on the Art of
Poetry. The Grave has been sung. The
earth, and the waters under it, and the fearsome
region under that; its " adamantine
chains and penal fire," its "ever burning
sulphur unconsumed," its " darkness visible,"
its burning marl and sights of terror. We
have heard the last lays of all the Last
Minstrels, and the Last Man has had his say,
or rather his song, under the auspices of
Campbell. The harp that once hung in Tara's
halls has not a string left, and nobody ought
to play upon it any more.

Take instead, oh ye poets, the wires of the
Electric Telegraph, and run your tuneful
fingers over those chords. Sing the poetry of
Railways. But what can there be of the
poetical, or even of the picturesque, element
in a Railway? Trunk lines, branch-lines,
loop-lines, and sidings; cuttings, embankments,
gradients, curves, and inclines; points,
switches, sleepers, fog-signals, and turn-tables;
locomotives, break-vans, buffers, tenders, and
whistles; platforms, tunnels, tubes, goods-sheds,
return-tickets, axle-grease, cattle-trains,
pilot engines, time-tables, and coal-trucks:
all these are eminently prosaic matter-of-fact
things, determined, measured and maintained
by line and rule, by the chapter and verse of
printed regulations and bye-laws signed by
Directors and Secretaries, and allowed by
Commissioners of Railways. Can there be
any poetry in the Secretary's office; in
dividends, debentures, scrip, preference-shares,
and deferred bonds ? Is there any poetry in
Railway time—the atrociously matter-of-fact
system of calculation that has corrupted the
half-past two o'clock of the old watchman
into two-thirty? Is Bradshaw poetical? Are
Messrs Pickford and Chaplin and Horne
poetical? How the deuce (I put words into
my opponent's mouths) are you to get any
poetry out of that dreariest combination of
straight lines, a railroad: straight rails,
straight posts, straight wires, straight stations,
and straight termini.

As if there could be anything poetical
about a Railroad! I hear Gusto the great
fine art Critic and judge of Literature say
this with a sneer, turning up his fine Roman
nose meanwhile. Poetry on a Railway!
cries Proseycard, the man of business—
nonsense! There may be some nonsensical verses
or so in the books that Messrs. W. H. Smith
and Sons sell at their stalls at the different
stations; but Poetry on or in the Railway
itself—ridiculous! Poetry on the Rail!
echoes Heavypace, the commercial traveller
—fudge! I travel fifteen thousand miles
by railway every year. I know every line,
branch, and station in Great Britain. I never
saw any poetry on the Rail. And a crowd of
passengers, directors, shareholders, engine-
drivers, guards, stokers, station-masters,
signal-men, and porters, with, I am ashamed
to fear, a considerable proportion of the
readers of Household Words, seem, to the
ears of my mind, to take up the cry, to laugh
scornfully at the preposterous idea of there
being possibly any such a thing as poetry
connected with so matter-of-fact an institution
as a Railway, and to look upon me in the
light of a fantastic visionary.

But I have tied myself to the stake; nailed
my colours to the mast; drawn the sword and
thrown away the scabbard: in fact, I have
written the title of this article, and must abide
the issue.

Take a Tunnel—in all its length, its
utter darkness, its dank coldness and
tempestuous windiness. To me a Tunnel is all
poetry. To be suddenly snatched away from
the light of day, from the pleasant
companionship of the fleecy clouds, the green
fields spangled with flowers, the golden
wheat, the fantastically changing embankments,
—now geological, now floral, now
rocky, now chalky; the hills, the valleys, and
the winding streams; the high mountains in
the distance that know they are emperors of
the landscape, and so wear purple robes right
imperially; the silly sheep in the meadows,
that graze so contentedly, unweeting that John
Hinds the butcher is coming down by the
next train to purchase them for the slaughter-
house; the little lambs that are not quite up
to railway-trains, their noise and bustle and
smoke, yet, and that scamper nervously away,
carrying their simple tails behind them; the
sententious cattle that munch, and lazily
watch the steam from the funnel as it breaks
into fleecy rags of vapour, and then fall to
munching again;—to be hurried from all
these into pitchy obscurity, seem to me
poetical and picturesque in the extreme. It
is like death in the midst of life, a sudden
suspension of vitality—the gloom and terror of
the grave pouncing like a hawk upon the
warmth and cheerfulness of life. Many an ode,
many a ballad could be written on that dark and
gloomy tunnel—the whirring roar and scream
and jarr of echoes, the clanging of wheels,
the strange voices that seem to make
themselves heard as the train rushes through the
tunnel, now in passionate supplication, now
in fierce anger and loud invective, now in an
infernal chorus of fiendish mirth and demoniac
exultation, now in a loud and long-continued
though inarticulate screech—a meaningless
howl like the ravings of a madman. To
understand and appreciate a tunnel in its
full aspect of poetic and picturesque horror,
you should travel in a third-class carriage.