SCALDED TO DEATH.
Steam has ruined a great many things for us, and spoiled much poetry
that was good and true in its time. The songs of the fireside to
myriads are dead songs. What do they know about hearths and hickory, of
backstick and forestick and topstick, and a great, cheerful fire, with
a human smile and a human companionship in it, who camp around an
unilluminated hole in the floor, and feel a gust of hot air like a
simoon? Did you ever sit before a fireplace in a fall night--an
eccentric philologist says that "autumn" is a better word than
"fall"!--with somebody you owned to loving very much; sat an hour
without speaking, and looked into the fire, you and he, you and she,
and yet it seemed to you as if you had been talking all the while? It
was the fire! No couple can sit and think thus around that defective
spot in the floor, and enjoy it, unless they are idiots. Then steam has
ruined the Iambic poetry of the flails, and substituted therefor a
gigantic smut-machine, that runs wild in the field, and puts people's
eyes out, and gives them the consumption, and burns up the wheat stack,
and blows up the engineer. Where is your champion cradler, that went in
with his skeleton fingers and laid out the grain becomingly, after a
Christian fashion? Dead. Steam killed him. And what has become of the
reaper, and Longfellow's, and everybody else's poetry about him? Cut to
pieces with knives, ground fine with wheels.
The clean and blessed fists that kneaded the dough after a pugilistic
fashion in the old days, and moulded it into an eloquent answer to
one of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, have forgotten their
cunning--steamed to death. Enter a Mechanical Bakery. Steam has
bewitched everything. Yonder are three, five, eight barrels of flour
tumbling about in a mass of dough that would crush a district school,
teacher and all. No hands. There are doors opening in the two-story
oven, and cars laden with bread and crackers come rolling out on a
railroad track, and the doors close behind them. No hands. Yonder runs
a train in at an open door. It will stay in the hot chamber twenty
minutes, and come out of its own accord. The engine has burned up the
rolling-pin and the moulding-board, and the big wooden cradle wherein
they kept the dough warm till it "rose" like any other member of the
family; the fork wherewith the blessed biscuits and the mince-pies were
tattooed like New Zealanders is thrown away, and the knife that marked
the old oval shortcakes thus, #, and without which household monogram
shortcakes were _not_ shortcakes, has followed the fork.
When they kindled a fire within the ribs of oak, and sent the steamer
panting around the world, the old tradition of the ship was scalded to
death. No more the tall masts cloud up, as the sky clouds, at the
captain's word of command. No more does the breath of his trumpet roll
up the piles of sails, volume above volume, and the nimble blue-jackets
perched aloft swing themselves along the ratlines, and cling to
nothing, like so many garden-spiders in their webs. It is a mimic storm
of canvas, with Jack-tars instead of angels playing "in the plighted
clouds!" Take a full-rigged ship, showing everything she can carry, and
dressed in her best bunting, and watch her with a glass as she comes up
into the horizon and stands squarely upon the visible sea, courtesying
her way into the harbor like a highborn dame of the olden time! It is
the stateliest thing, so far, of man's making.
Read of the naval battles that went long ago into song and story;
of the great admirals; of Nelson and the rest; of the masterly
manoeuvering of McDonough and Perry and all the dead Commodores that
have made lake and sea memorable, when they spread their great wings
and swooped down upon the enemy like sea-eagles. It is grand to think
of. No machinery below deck grinding away like a mill; nothing aboard
but the capstan, to heave in the cables and bring the anchors home. It
must have been something worth while to float a broad pennant from a
seventy-four, manned with a thousand men! Steam and wheels have
succeeded to the old glories, and when you see a low-quartered
crocodile of a thing, black, unseemly, hugging the water, and with a
dingy-looking drum upon its back, never despise it! There is no
telling what it can do. It is a turreted monitor in an iron jacket,
and carries a gun so preposterously large, that it is not a boat with
a gun in it, but a gun with a boat to it. It rips up your seventy-four
as a rhinoceros an elephant, and sneaks about under the guns
unscathed.
Of guns: those Woolwich infants, as they call them with a sort of grim
facetiousness, that will throw eight hundred pounds of iron seven
miles! As far as you can trot a horse comfortably in an hour. Couldn't
they be used to move an iron-mine from one country to another? These
devices, that steam and wheels are at the bottom of, brought into the
service of Mars and his tomahawk of a sister, Bellona, never seemed to
me so much the square and fair implements of manly warfare, as infernal
machines that ought to be gathered up and packed away in the basement
of John Milton's "Paradise Lost," with their makers just inside the
door to keep watch lest somebody should steal them! Then, again, wheels
are doing their best to trundle an exquisite Scriptural picture out of
fashion. Ships flock not so much "like doves to the windows," as
tremendous forges afloat, with their pillared smokes on high; the very
cloud that came out of the little bottle and took shape, and was the
greatest of the Genii in the Arabian Nights.