idea of a certain celebrated character, (not
"Quintus Curtius," but Geoffrey Crayon, I believe,) that the time we
spend in journeying is just so much subtracted from our little span of
days, what a fearful loss of life must have resulted from our old
modes of locomotion! And yet we inconsiderately grumble at an
occasional smash-up! So easily are we spoiled!

There are grave doubts, however, in some minds, whether our present
celerity of travel be wholly a gain upon the old methods. It must
depend upon circumstances. If agreeable people virtually live longer
now, so do bores, cheats, slanderers, hypocrites, and people who eat
onions and chew tobacco; and the rail enables these to pursue their
victims with inevitable, fatal swiftness.

Some hold that the pleasure of travelling is even impaired by this
increase of speed. There is such a thing as fatal facility. As well
eat a condensed dinner, or hear a concert in one comprehensive crash,
ear-splitting and soul-confounding, as see miles of landscape at a
glance. Willis says, travelling on an English railway is equivalent to
having so many miles of green damask unrolled before your weary eyes.
And one may certainly have too much of a good thing.

But, instead of discussing railroads in general,--too grand a theme
for me,--let me say that nobody can persuade me it is not delightful
to fly over ground scarcely yet trodden by the foot of man; to
penetrate, with the most subtle resources of inventive art, the
recesses in which Nature has enshrined herself most privately,--her
dressing-room, as it were, where we find her in her freshness, before
man-milliners have marred her beauty by attempts at improvement. The
contrast between that miracle of art, a railroad-train at full speed,
and a wide, lonely prairie, or a dusky forest, leafless, chilly, and
silent,--save for the small tinkling of streams beginning to break
from their frosty limits,--is one of the most striking in all the wide
range of rural effects. It reminds me, though perhaps unaccountably to
some, of Browning's fine image,--

"And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt through the pine-tree roof, here burnt
and there,
As if God's messenger through the close
wood-screen
Plunged and re-plunged his weapon at a venture."

Even where fields have begun to be tilled and houses and barns to be
built, the scared flying of domestic animals at sound of the terrific
visitor,--the resistless chariot