THE STEAM-WHISTLE.

While Mr. Ruskin was lately bewailing the bell-ringing propensity of
mankind, the English Parliament and several American legislatures,
city or State, were assaulting the greater nuisance of the
steam-whistle, and trying to substitute bell-ringing for it. Mr.
Ruskin's particular grievance was, that his own nerves were _crispe_
by the incessant ding-dong of the church-bells of Florence summoning
the devout to prayer, but he generalized his wrath. Possibly, he
would have been less sensitive and fastidious regarding the musical
carillons of the Italian city were he wont to dwell within ear-shot of
an American factory or railroad-station. Not that Mr. Ruskin fails to
appreciate--or, rather, to depreciate--railways in their connection
with Italian landscapes; for, besides his series of complaints
regarding the Florence bells, he denounces the railway from Rome to
Naples, and the railway-tunnels under Monts Cenis and St. Gothard, and
the railway-bridge leading into Venice, as enemies of the beautiful
and picturesque in Nature. But it is the locomotive, independent of
the shriek, that is his abomination; whereas a man less sensitive to
sights, and (if possible) more sensitive to sounds, might pardon the
cutting up of the landscape were his ear-drum spared from splitting.

Emerson asks, "What is so odious as noise?" But a _Saturday Reviewer_
once devoted an elaborate essay to the eulogy of unmitigated noise, or
rather to the keen enjoyment of it by children. People with enviable
nerves and unenviable tastes often enjoy sounds in the ratio of their
lack of melody--say, such everyday thoroughfare music as the slap and
bang of coach-wheels on the cobble-stones; the creaking of street-cars
round a sharp curve, like Milton's infernal doors "grating harsh
thunder;" the squeaking falsettos of the cries by old-clothes' men,
itinerant glaziers, fishmongers, fruiterers, tinkers and what not; the
yells of rival coachmen at the railway-stations, giving one an idea
of Bedlam; the street-fiddlers and violinists with horribly untuned
instruments; the Italian open-air singers hoarsely shouting,
"Shoo Fly" or "Viva Garibaldi! viva l'Italia!" the gongs beaten on
steamboats and by hotel-runners at stations on the arrival of trains;
the unearthly squeals and shrieks of new "musical instruments" sold
cheap by street-peddlers; the horrible noise-producers which boys
invent for the torture of nervous people--such, for ex