IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY 51 



cognomen looked well on the toiling, fiery-hearted, 

 iron-browed monster. I think its original owner 

 would have contemplated it with grim pleasure, 

 especially since he confesses to having spent some 

 time, once, in trying to look up a shipmaster who 

 had named his vessel for him. Here was a hero 

 after his own sort, a leader by the divine right of 

 the expansive power of steam. 



The human faculties of observation have not yet 

 adjusted themselves to the flying train. Steam has 

 clapped wings to our shoulders without the power 

 to soar; we get bird's-eye views without the bird's 

 eyes or the bird's elevation, distance without breadth, 

 detail without mass. If such speed only gave us a 

 proportionate extent of view, if this leisure of the 

 eye were only mated to an equal leisure in the 

 glance ! Indeed, when one thinks of it, how near 

 railway traveling, as a means of seeing a country, 

 comes, except in the discomforts of it, to being no 

 traveling at all ! It is like being tied to your chair, 

 and being jolted and shoved about at home. The 

 landscape is turned topsy-turvy. The eye sustains 

 unnatural relations to all but the most distant 

 objects. We move in an arbitrary plane, and sel- 

 dom is anything seen from the proper point, or with 

 the proper sympathy of coordinate position. We 

 shall have to wait for the air ship to give us the 

 triumph over space in which the eye can share. Of 

 this flight south from Edinburgh on that bright 

 summer day, I keep only the most general impres- 

 sion. I recall how clean and naked the country 



