To first and second class passengers the
luxury of lamplight is by the gracious favour
of the Directors of the company condescendingly
extended; and in passing through a
tunnel they are enabled dimly to descry
their fellow-travellers; but for the third
class voyager darkness both outer and
inner are provided—darkness so complete
and so intense, that as we are borne
invisibly on our howling way, dreadful
thoughts spring up in our minds of blindness;
that we have lost our sight for ever!
Vainly we endeavour to peer through the
darkness, to strain our eyes to descry one
ray of light, one outline—be it ever so dim—
of a human figure; one thin bead of day
upon a panel, a ledge, a window-sill, or a
door. Is there not matter for bards in all
this?—in the length of the tunnel, its darkness
and clamour; in the rage and fury of
the engine eating its strong heart, burnt up
by inward fire like a man consumed by his
own passions; in the seemingly everlasting
duration of the deprival from light and day
and life; but a deprival which ends at last.
Ah, how glad and welcome that restoration
to sunshine is! We seem to have had a
sore and dangerous sickness, and to be
suddenly and graciously permitted to rise
from a bed of pain and suffering, and
enter at once into the enjoyment of the
rudest health, with all its comforts and
enjoyments, with all its cheerful pleasures
and happy forgetfulness of the ills that are
gone, and unconscious nescience of the ills
that are to come, and that must come, and
surely.

Whenever I pass through a tunnel I
meditate upon these things, and wish heartily
that I were a poet, that I might tune my
heart to sing the poetry of railway tunnels.
I don't know whether the same thoughts
strike other people. I suppose they do, I
hope they do. It may be that I muse more
on tunnels, and shape their length and blackness,
and coldness and noise, to subjects fit
to be wedded to immortal verse; because I
happen to reside on a railway, and that
almost every morning and evening throughout
the week I have to pass through a tunnel of
prodigious length,—to say the truth, nearly
as long as the Box Tunnel, on the Great
Western Railway. Morning and night we
dash from the fair fields of Kent,—from
the orchards and the hop-gardens,—from the
sight of the noble river in the distance, with
its boats and barges and huge ships, into this
Erebus, pitch dark, nearly three miles long,
and full of horrid noises. Sometimes I travel
in the lamp-lit carriages, and then I find
it poetical to watch the flickering gleams of
the sickly light upon shrouded figures, muffled
closely in railway rugs and mantles and
shawls,—the ladies, who cower timidly in
corners; the children, who, half-pleased,
half-frightened, don't seem to know whether
to laugh or cry, and compromise the matter,
by sitting with their mouths wide open, and
incessantly asking why it is so dark, and why
there is such a noise. Sometimes, and I am
not ashamed to confess, much more
frequently, I make my journey in the poor
man's carriage—the "parly," or third class.
In that humble "parly" train, believe me,
there is much more railway poetry
attainable than in the more aristocratic
compartments. Total darkness, more noise
(for the windows are generally open, and the
reverberation consequently much greater),
more mocking voices, more mystery, and more
romance. I have even gone through tunnels
in those vile open standing-up cars, called
by an irreverent public " pig-boxes," and
seemingly provided by railway directors as a
cutting reproach on, and stern punishment
for, poverty. Yet I have drunk deeply of
railway poetry in a "pig-box." There is
something grand, there is something epic ;
there is something really sublime in the
gradual melting away of the darkness into
light ; in the decadence of total eclipse and
the glorious restoration of the sun to his
golden rights again. Standing up in the
coverless car you see strange, dim, fantastic,
changing shapes above you. The daylight
becomes irriguous, like dew, upon the steam
from the funnel, the roofs of the carriages,
the brickwork sides of the tunnel itself. But
nothing is defined, nothing fixed : all the
shapes are irresolute, fleeting, confused, like
the events in the memory of an old man.
The tunnel becomes a phantom tube—a dry
Styx—the train seems changed into Charon's
boat, and the engine-driver turns into the
infernal ferryman. And the end of that
awful navigation must surely be Tartarus.
You think so, you fancy yourself in the boat,
as Dante and Virgil were in the Divine
Comedy ; ghosts cling to the sides, vainly
repenting, uselessly lamenting ; Francesca of
Rimini floats despairing by ; far off, mingled
with the rattle of wheels, are heard the
famine-wrung moans of Ugolino's children.
Hark to that awful shrilly, hideous, prolonged
yell—a scream like that they say that Catherine
of Russia gave on her deathbed, and
which, years afterwards, was wont to haunt
the memories of those that had heard it.
Lord be good to us ! there is the scream
again : it is the first scream of a lost spirit's
last agony ; the cry of the child of earth
waking up into the Ever and Ever of pain ;
it is Facinata screaming in her sepulchre of
flames—no, it is simply the railway whistle
as the train emerges from the tunnel into
sunlight again. The ghosts vanish, there are
no more horrible sights and noises, no flying
sparks, no red lamps at intervals like demon
eyes. I turn back in the "pig-box," and
look at the arched entrance to the tunnel we
have just quitted. I seemed to fancy there
should be an inscription over it bidding all
who enter to leave Hope behind ; but instead
of that there is simply, hard by, a placard