The Hon. Edward Everett in the course of his speech at the Boston
Railroad Jubilee in commemoration of the opening of railroad
communication between Boston and Canada, observed, “But, sir, as I have
already said, it is not the material results of this railroad system in
which its happiest influences are seen. I recollect that seven or eight
years ago there was a project to carry a railroad into the lake country
in England—into the heart of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Mr.
Wordsworth, the lately deceased poet, a resident in the centre of this
region, opposed the project. He thought that the retirement and
seclusion of this delightful region would be disturbed by the panting of
the locomotive and the cry of the steam whistle. If I am not mistaken,
he published one or two sonnets in deprecation of the enterprise. Mr.
Wordsworth was a kind-hearted man, as well as a most distinguished poet,
but he was entirely mistaken, as it seems to me, in this matter. The
quiet of a few spots may be disturbed, but a hundred quiet spots are
rendered accessible. The bustle of the station-house may take the place
of the Druidical silence of some shady dell; but, Gracious Heavens, sir,
how many of those verdant cathedral arches, entwined by the hand of God
in our pathless woods, are opened to the grateful worship of man by these
means of communication?
“How little of rural beauty you lose, even in a country of comparatively
narrow dimensions like England—how less than little in a country so vast
as this—by works of this description. You lose a little strip along the
line of the road, which partially changes its character; while, as the
compensation, you bring all this rural beauty,
‘The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, the garniture of fields,’
within the reach, not of a score of luxurious, sauntering tourists, but
of the great mass of the population, who have senses and tastes as keen
as the keenest. You throw it open, with all its soothing and humanizing
influences, to thousands who, but for your railways and steamers, would
have lived and died without ever having breathed the life-giving air of
the mountains; yes, sir, to tens of thousands who would have gone to
their graves, and the sooner for the prevention, without ever having
caught a glimpse of the most magnificent and beautiful spectacle which
nature presents to the eye of man, that of a glorious curving wave, a
quarter-of-a-mile long, as it comes swelling and breasting toward the
shore, till its soft green ridge bursts into a crest of snow, and settles
and digs along the whispering sands.”