The loss of the old plough, and the old barn,
and the old thatched house, is a serious loss. It
is a loss of nearly half the attractiveness of rural
England. The old forms of agriculture were so
inseparable from one's delight in the country.
All day long, and at any time of the day, there
was something going on that it was pleasant to
watch. All day long, the plough, or the harrow,
or the reaping-hook and scythe, according to
the season, were at work. Winter and summer
there was always agricultural work a-doing. And
then there was the mid-day rest, and the group
of peasants beneath some shady old tree. Imagine
the repose of a congregation of engineers and
stokers, surrounding a grim locomotive planted
in the middle of a half-ploughed field! What a
group that would be for a landscape-painter!
Plenty of lamp-black would be wanted, at any
rate. And when the night fell in the old time,
when the labourer unyoked his team, and man
and horse went their slow and weary way
back to their master's home, when the unbroken
colts gathered about the gate that opened on the
lane to exchange a passing neigh with their
friends who had been at work, the said colts
looking vague and enormous in the darkness—
and later, when the candle in the old horn lantern
was kindled, and was to be seen slowly moving
about the farm-yard as the hind visited the
different objects of his charge before seeking
rest himself—were not all these things
associated with happy memories of the country,
and does not the mere presence of a steam-
engine in one of those out-buildings walk away
with at least half of the poetry of the scene?
There is a great noisy rampant thrashing-
machine, which is always travelling about a
certain part of the country with which I am familiar,
and which machine goes among the natives by
the name of "Puffing Billy." Good Heaven!
how that engine mars the landscape as it
passes! Horses go raving mad at its approach,
and have to be held by the nose as it goes by.
Poor things, they know they are powerless
against it. "Puffing Billy" could crush them
with ease, but what could they do against his
iron sides?

It may be that when the first shock inseparable
from these great changes is over, when our senses
are more accustomed to iron, and smoke, and
clatter of machinery, a new Poetry and a new
Picturesqueness will become developed. Men even
of middle age can hardly expect to see perfectly,
these elements in things so different from those
with which their softer and younger thoughts
were associated. What of the age which grows
up free of our ancient memories? What of the
age whose children play at driving engines, as we
did at coach and horses? They will grow to
look upon objects that have been mixed up with
their joys and sorrows, their loves and fears, with
other eyes than ours. The shriek of the locomotive,
and its two glaring eyes, as it tears its way
through the darkness, to us already full of a
wild picturesqueness of their own, may be to
them more romantic than the soft gliding of the
gondola; while the Rialto, under which the boat
is drifting, has for them less of poetry than the
span of the viaduct, or the darkness of the
Alpine tunnel.

Let justice be done though we perish in doing
it. Justice to the past whose picturesque and
poetical elements we can see without effort;
justice also to the present, when those same
qualities need to be looked for with earnest, and,
above all, with unprejudiced eyes, and are only
seen after a victory painfully achieved over
many of our strongest antipathies. It is difficult
to give up our old ideas, and to accept
frankly those that are new and strange; but
it is of the last importance that we should
acquire the power of doing so. We are for ever
shedding some portion of that husk in which
our immortality dwells, and to each scale of it,
as it drops from us, we cling with a lingering
love and regret. Now suppose we try the
plan of adapting ourselves to the new things.
Suppose—since these changes have taken place,
and since it is right that they should take place
—suppose we go forward to meet them, and
look out for their good qualities rather than their
bad. We have just sung a dirge over the old
things. But we must not look with a grudging
eye on the new things. After all, when one
comes to think of it, it is not a certainly
ascertained fact that steam is so entirely unpicturesque
and unpoetical as we were inclined to
make it out just now. There is something that
the most exalted poet need not despise, about
that great conflict which takes place between
fire and water when the steam-ship puts out to
sea. There is but a plank between the fire that
rules, and the water that reluctantly obeys.
And, curiously enough, the very water is in a
manner turned against itself, and made to work
as the servant of the great furnace which turns
it into steam. That triumph of the man over
the tremendous elements is a grand thing, and
perhaps to the full as poetical as the victory of
our patron saint over the dragon. Who knows
but that, in reality, that assiduous and intelligent
toil of the engineer, who year by year works on
to accomplish a task beset by almost invincible
difficulties, is as romantic an undertaking as that
of the old knight-errant or the crusader? The
qualities called into play by such an enterprise
as the construction of the new underground
railway, are higher qualities than those
demanded of the ancient warrior. Patience,
endurance, courage, self-denial, perseverance—
what demands are made upon all these faculties
in the course of such an undertaking! The annals
of that enterprise, the deeds of that army of
navigators, headed by their various officers,
and led on by General Fowler, C.E., might
form the argument of a modern epic. Could
anything be more romantic than the story of
their conflicts with the water-spirits and the
gas-demons down in the underground world of
London?

The " seeing eye" is what we need. It was
this that Turner possessed. Late in his career,
when the man was old, and when the prejudices
of one of narrower mind would have been at