I \ . 



IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY.^^ 57 



from Edinburgh was named Thomas Carlyle. The 

 cognomen looked well on the toiling, fiery-hearted, 

 iron-browed monster. I think its original owner 

 would have contemplated it with grim pleasure, es- 

 pecially since he confesses to having spent some time, 

 once, in trying to look up a ship-master 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, de- 

 tail without mass. If such speed only gave us a pro- 

 portionate 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, ex- 

 cept 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 re- 

 lations to all but the most distant objects. We move 

 in an arbitrary plane, and seldom 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 ou that bright summer day, I keep only 



