whether of the flesh or the spirit, who, at a glance, can
gaze through massive walls and peer down the chimneys of a great city,
and who, almost without glancing at all, can see through partitions,
key-holes and iron doors, your wonder at the cause of these unknown
sounds would instantly cease, while it would be yet more excited by
those causes themselves, for the vast building all around you, and
through which you are passing, and which envelops you in its ceaseless
hum, like the voice of a great city, would seem to you nothing less than
a leviathan of life and action--a Titan--a Frankenstein--a mental and
material giant, with its acoustic tubes, like veins and arteries,
running all over the structure, just beneath the surface of the walls,
and uniting in every apartment; with its electric wires, like bundles of
nerves, which, having webbed the whole body with network, converge into
a focus-tube, and thence pass down into the vaults, through the massive
foundations, and beneath, the pavements of the thronged streets of the
metropolis, and thence, rising again to the surface, branching on
distinct, diverse and solitary routes without the suburbs all over
Europe. You would see, too, the mighty heart of this Titan, whose heavy
heavings you have felt, heard and wondered at--THE PRESS--in its
subterranean tenement, amid smoke and flame. THE PRESS; which, like the
animal heart, receives eventually all that the veins convey to it, and
flings forth everything in modified form through lungs and arteries.
Tireless and untired in its action, never ceasing, never resting, for as
well might a man think to live when his heart had ceased to beat, as a
printing office exist when the throbbings of its press were no longer
felt; and as well could a man be supposed to live without breath as a
printing-office of the nineteenth century without its lungs, the steam
engine, or its breath of life, the subtle fluid by which it is moved.

But to drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find the
press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark
demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or
flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked,
seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if
a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae
in the heathen Tartarus, was eternal. The press never stops.

On the first floor you would percei