There is a feeling in heroic poetry, or in a burst of eloquence, that I
sometimes catch in quite different fields. I caught it this morning,
for instance, when I saw the belated trains go by, and knew how they
had been battling with storm, darkness, and distance, and had triumphed.
They were due at my place in the night, but did not pass till after
eight o'clock in the morning. Two trains coupled together,--the fast
mail and the express,--making an immense line of coaches hauled by two
engines. They had come from the West, and were all covered with snow and
ice, like soldiers with the dust of battle upon them. They had massed
their forces, and were now moving with augmented speed, and with a
resolution that was epic and grand. Talk about the railroad dispelling
the romance from the landscape; if it does, it brings the heroic element
in. The moving train is a proud spectacle, especially on stormy and
tempestuous nights. When I look out and see its light, steady and
unflickering as the planets, and hear the roar of its advancing tread,
or its sound diminishing in the distance, I am comforted and made stout
of heart. O night, where is thy stay! O space, where is thy victory! Or
to see the fast mail pass in the morning is as good as a page of Homer.
It quickens one's pulse for all day. It is the Ajax of trains. I hear
its defiant, warning whistle, hear it thunder over the bridges, and its
sharp, rushing ring among the rocks, and in the winter mornings see its
glancing, meteoric lights, or in summer its white form bursting through
the silence and the shadows, its plume of smoke lying flat upon its
roofs and stretching far behind,--a sight better than a battle. It
is something of the same feeling one has in witnessing any wild, free
careering in storms, and in floods in nature; or in beholding the
charge of an army; or in listening to an eloquent man, or to a hundred
instruments of music in full blast,--it is triumph, victory. What is
eloquence but mass in motion,--a flood, a cataract, an express train, a
cavalry charge? We are literally carried away, swept from our feet, and
recover our senses again as best we can.
I experienced the same emotion when I saw them go by with the sunken
steamer. The procession moved slowly and solemnly. It was like a funeral
cortege,--a long line of grim floats and barges and boxes, with their
bowed and solemn derricks, the pall-bearers; and underneath in her
watery grave, where she had been for six months, the sunken steamer,
partially lifted and borne along. Next day the procession went back
again, and the spectacle was still more eloquent. The steamer had been
taken to the flats above and raised till her walking-beam was out of
water; her bell also was exposed and cleaned and rung, and the wreckers'
Herculean labor seemed nearly over. But that night the winds and the
storms held high carnival. It looked like preconcerted action on the
part of tide, tempest, and rain to defeat these wreckers, for the
elements all pulled together and pulled till cables and hawser snapped
like threads. Back the procession started, anchors were dragged or lost,
immense new cables were quickly taken ashore and fastened to trees; but
no use: trees were upturned, the cables stretched till they grew
small and sang like harp-strings, then parted; back, back against the
desperate efforts of the men, till within a few feet of her old
grave, when there was a great commotion among the craft, floats were
overturned, enormous chains parted, colossal timbers were snapped
like pipestems, and, with a sound that filled all the air, the steamer
plunged to the bottom again in seventy feet of water.