Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429

A crowd of ladies were watching with great attention the Sewing-machine—sewing away with the greatest exactness, and much stronger than by the ordinary mode with a needle, as each stitch is a knot. The inventor was shewing it; and he said he had nearly completed a machine for the button-holes. The next was a machine called 'The Man'—and truly named, for a more marvellous production can scarcely be conceived—for making implements for carding wool or cotton, the article passing in as raw wire, going through before our eyes four processes of the most delicate description, and finally coming out a perfect card, with its wire-teeth exactly set, and ready for use. My attention was drawn to the application of the Jacquard principle to a loom engaged in weaving a calico fabric, of various colours woven with a pattern, and thus producing an elegant article, thick, and well adapted for bed-furniture. But the most curious and simple, and withal, perhaps, the most important invention for facilitating manufactures, is what is called the 'Turpin Wheel,' taking its name from the inventor. How simple may be the birth of a great idea! We all observe that a log under a waterfall, coming down perpendicularly upon it, spins round, as on an axis, till it escapes. This led to the invention in question. The water falls upon the spokes of a horizontal wheel, which it sends round with great velocity; and by this contrivance the force of the water is more than doubled. I must not omit to mention the machine just invented for weaving the fabric we call Brussels carpeting. This machine will weave twenty yards of carpeting per day, with one female to attend it. The carpet is worth 3s. per yard, while the wages paid for human aid in its production is 1¼d. per yard: machinery can go little further. Let me add, that I was informed that everything on this floor was the invention of working-men.

Upon ascending to the first floor, I found the apartment arranged with stands—each stand devoted to one sort of manufacture—and attended, as below, by an intelligent person, to shew and explain. Here was every description of furniture, cotton, and woollen fabric; but neither velvets nor silks, which have not, as yet, been introduced. We know so much of our doings in England in the woollen and cotton line, that my attention was principally attracted to these specimens. Here was everything except the broad-cloths—all the patterns of plaid-shawls, so beautifully imitated and executed, that they would, I am sure, pass in Edinburgh. I saw the kerseymere fabric that obtained the prize in London, and nothing could be more beautiful; for the calicoes, I believe we cannot produce them cheaper or better. A writer in a journal here, observes: 'Why should our cotton go to England to be spun when we can spin it in Massachusetts?' A very pertinent question, well worth thinking of at home. We should be thankful to the projectors of the Crystal Palace, that it has opened our eyes, for nothing else could. There is no manner of doubt, that we can learn something beyond yacht-sailing; but we shall not open our eyes to the widest until the arrival in our market of the first cargo of manufactured woollens and cottons; and as surely as we have barrels of flour and pork, we shall soon find them with us: I saw first-rate calico, which could be sold at 2d. per yard.

The exports of manufactured goods from this country to all parts of the world is increasing weekly; but of all that another time, for I am carefully collecting information. One stand I would not omit, as it furnished evidence of the condition of the operatives. The exhibition is managed by the mechanics themselves, and the profits are devoted to the support of a mechanics' institute, with the usual advantages of library, balls, and concerts, but of a very superior order; while every female who provides any article of her own production for exhibition and sale, has a free ticket admitting to all the advantages of the institution. This is found a useful stimulus, as the stand for those articles testified, consisting as they did of all descriptions of fancy-work: rugs, chair-bottoms, table-covers, tapestry, &c. produced in overhours, tasteful in design, and beautiful in execution. Let me not forget an invention, which is as great a boon to sufferers as the water-bed: it is a contrivance applied to an ordinary bedstead, which, by turning a handle, will support any part of the body, or place the body in any required position. It was the invention of a mechanic, who was nine months in bed in consequence of an accident, and felt the want of something of the kind. It is adapted to a bedstead at a cost of L.3.

From thence I went to the cattle-show. I could see but little of that, as most of the animals were gone; but I was assured it was very fine. I believe it, if what I saw was a specimen—a pair of working oxen, perfectly white, the pair weighing 7000 pounds. In our cattle-shows at home, we find plenty of bulk, but it destroys form and symmetry: here both were preserved. The fowls are of the long-legged Spanish breed, coming to table like trussed ostriches; the plump English barndoor sort are about being introduced. I had nearly forgotten a beautiful and extraordinary invention—a rifle, not heavier than the common one, that will discharge twenty-four balls in succession without reloading. Where the ramrod is usually placed, is a smaller barrel, containing, when filled, twenty-four ball-cartridges, and, after discharging, the action of recocking introduces another cartridge, and so on, until the whole are discharged; the whole twenty-four can be discharged in as many seconds!

After leaving this interesting exhibition, where I could have lingered a whole day, I was joined by a friend, an American—a gentleman of great attainments in science—to whose remarks I am indebted for the following scraps. The Merrimac, when low—as when I saw it—is a trifling stream, having a bottom of laminated rock, worn in channels by the stream. At spring and fall, there is ten or fifteen feet of depth; and to remedy this inequality, an important work was undertaken and executed: to this we bent our way. It is a canal in form, but should more properly be called a reservoir. It is 1¼ miles long, 100 feet wide, and 15 feet deep; of solid granite, sides and bottom—equal in durability to any work, ancient or modern. It is about half way cut through the solid granite rock, which in that part furnishes a natural wall. My friend had watched its progress, and gave me many interesting details of the engineering processes employed: among others, the tremendous application of steam and gunpowder. An engine bored holes in the rock fifteen feet deep and twelve inches in diameter; and these were so placed, and in such numbers, that at a single blast 170 tons of granite were blown into the air—an operation hardly conceivable. This canal leaves the town in a westerly direction—being, at its outset, about a quarter of a mile from the Merrimac, but gradually approximating for a quarter of a mile, until it touches and unites with that river. Between the two, is one of the prettiest of public walks, ten feet wide, having rows of trees on each side, and terminating in a point; being the end of a splendid granite wall, at its base thirty feet thick, and tapering to half the thickness, dividing the natural from the artificial stream. Here we come to a point of great interest: on the right is an artificial dam across the river, with two sharp lines at an angle of sixty-seven degrees, the point meeting the stream, thus stopping the waters, and insuring a supply for the reservoir, while it forms a cascade of about twenty feet.

My friend gave me a very graphic description of the opening of the works. The whole was built in a cofferdam, quite dry, and the opening was a holiday. Every spot within sight was covered with spectators, for whom the engineer had contrived a surprise. The works used in keeping the water out of the reservoir, and protecting the new dam, were undermined, and charged with gunpowder. At a given signal, the train was fired, and in an instant the whole blew up; and when the smoke cleared away, the fragments were floating down the Merrimac, and the canal full of water.

On the left from the point, the egress of water is regulated by flood-gates of a superior construction. The building crosses the canal, and contains seven huge gates, which are raised or dropped into their places by beautiful machinery. To each gate is attached an immense screw, which stands perpendicularly, twenty feet long and ten inches in diameter. At its upper end, it passes through a matrix-worm in the centre of a large cog-wheel, lying horizontally The whole is set in motion by the slightest turning of a handle; and here I saw the application of the Turpin Wheel I spoke of before—no engine or complication, but a wheel fifteen feet in diameter, fixed horizontally, submerged in the stream, receiving the falling waters, and thus rapidly revolving, and by a gear, giving motion to the machinery for raising or lowering the immense gates, stopped or set going by merely turning a stop-cock, and requiring no more force than an ordinary water-cistern.

I cannot leave this interesting spot without an attempt to describe the beautiful scene. A little to the right, the river widens into a sort of bay, with several fine islands covered with wood; in front, across the stream, as far as the eye can reach, are the forests of New Hampshire, with occasional headlands of greensward. In the autumn, it has exactly the appearance of a gigantic flower-garden—the trees being of every imaginable colour. 'Ah!' said my friend, 'this is an interesting spot: it was the favourite residence and hunting-ground of the Chippewas. The Indians, like your monks of old in Europe, always chose the most beautiful and picturesque sites for their dwellings; but they have retired before the advance of a civilisation they could not share or appreciate.' Talking in this way, as we returned, he called my attention to a singular phenomenon in the river. At some remote period there was, and it remains to the present moment, a rock standing in the middle of the stream, about twelve feet in diameter at the top, of an irregular form, and of the hardest granite. By the action of the water, a mass of granite had been thrown on the top, where it lodged. At high-water, perhaps during three months in each year, the stream had caused this mass to revolve on its own axis, until it has worn itself of a round figure, and worn also the rock into a cup, now about six feet deep. Still, it revolves when the water reaches it—nature still plays at this cup-and-ball—the ball weighing five tons. Talk of this sort brought us to the railway. In due time I reached home; and I do not remember to have ever been more interested than by the day spent at Lowell.

THE SEA AND THE POETS

Of three poets, each the most original in his language, and each peculiarly susceptible of impressions from external nature—Horace, Shakspeare, and Burns—not one seems to have appreciated the beauty, the majestic sublimity, the placid loveliness, alternating with the terrific grandeur, of the 'many-sounding sea.' Judging from their incidental allusions to it, and the use they make of it in metaphor and imagery, it would seem to have presented itself to their imaginations only as a fierce, unruly, untamable, and unsightly monster, to be loathed and avoided—a blot on the fair face of creation—a necessary evil, perhaps; but still an evil, and most certainly suggestive of no ideas poetic in their character.

It is marvellous, for there is not one of these poets who does not discover a lively sense of the varied charms of universal nature, and has not painted them in glowing colours with the pencil of a master. Who has not noted with what evident love, with what a nicely-discriminative knowledge Shakspeare has pictured our English flowers, our woodland glades, the forest scenery of Old England, before the desolating axe had prostrated the pride of English woods? How vividly has not Burns translated into vigorous verse each feature of his native landscape, till

—– 'Auld Coila's plains and fells,
Her muirs, red-brown wi' heather-bells,
Her banks and braes, her dens and dells,'

live again in the magic of his song. And Horace—with what charming playfulness, with what exquisite grace, has he not figured the olive-groves of Tibur, the pendent vines ruddy with the luscious grape, the silver streams, the sparkling fountains and purple skies of fruitful Campania! Looking on nature with a poet's eye, as did these poets, one and all of them, is it not a psychological mystery that none of them should have detected the ineffable beauty of a sea-prospect?

First, as to Horace. When climbing the heights of Mount Vultur, that Lucanian hill where once, when overcome by fatigue, the youthful poet lay sleeping, and doves covered his childish and wearied limbs with leaves—Horace must have often viewed, with their wide expanse glittering in the sun, the waters of the Adriatic—often must he have hailed the grateful freshness of the sea-breeze and the invigorating perfumes of

—– 'the early sea-smell blown
Through vineyards from some inland bay.'

Yet about this sea, which should have kindled his imagination and inspired his genius, this thankless bard poetises in a vein such as a London citizen, some half-century back, might have indulged in after a long, tedious, 'squally' voyage in an overladen Margate hoy.

No such spirit possessed him as that which dictated poor Campbell's noble apostrophe to the glorious 'world of waters:'

—– 'Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine;
The eagle's vision cannot take it in;
The lightning's glance, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it, like a wearied bird:
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.'

Horace, indeed, has sung the praises of Tarentum—that beautiful maritime city of the Calabrian Gulf, whose attractions were such as to make the delights of Tarentum a common proverbial expression. But what were these delights as celebrated by our poet?—the perfection of its honey, the excellence of its olives, the abundance of its grapes, its lengthened spring and temperate winter. For these, its merits, did Horace prefer, as he tells us, Tarentum to every other spot on the wide earth—his beloved Tibur only and ever excepted. In truth, Horace valued and visited the sea-side only in winter, and then simply because its climate was milder than that to be met with inland, and therefore more agreeable to the dilapidated constitution of a sensitive valetudinarian. His commentators suppose he produced nothing during his marine hybernations: if the inclement season froze 'the genial current of his soul,' the aspect of the sea did not thaw it.

His motive for his sea-side trips is amusingly set forth in one of the most lively and characteristic of his Epistles—the fifteenth of the first book. In this he inquires of a friend what sort of winter weather is to be found at Velia and Salernum; two cities, one on the Adriatic, the other on the Mediterranean seaboard of Italy—what manner of roads they had—whether the people there drank tank-water or spring-water—and whether hares, boars, crabs, and fish were with them abundant. He adds, he is not apprehensive about their wines—knowing these, as we may infer, to be good—although usually, when from home, he is scrupulous about his liquors; whilst, when at home, he can put up almost with anything in the way of potations. It is quite plain Horace went down to the sea just in the spirit in which a turtle-fed alderman would transfer himself to Cheltenham; or in which a fine lady, whose nerves the crush, hurry, and late hours of a London season had somewhat disturbed, would exchange the dissipations of Mayfair for the breezy hills of Malvern, or the nauseous waters of Tunbridge Wells.

This certainly explains, and perhaps excuses, the grossly uncivil terms in which alone he notices the sea. One of the worst of Ulysses' troubles was, according to him, the numerous and lengthy sea-voyages which that Ithacan gadabout had to take. Horace wishes for Mævius, who was his aversion, no worse luck than a rough passage and shipwreck at the end of it. His notion of a happy man—ille beatus—is one who has not to dread the sea. Augustus, whose success had blessed not only his own country, but the whole world, had—not the least of his blessings—given to the seamen a calmed sea—pacatum mare. Lamenting at Virgil's departure for Athens, he rebukes the impiety of the first mariner who ventured, in the audacity of his heart, to go afloat and cross the briny barrier interposed between nations. He esteems a merchant favoured specially by the gods, should he twice or thrice a year return in safety from an Atlantic cruise. He tells us he himself had known the terrors of 'the dark gulf of the Adriatic,' and had experienced 'the treachery of the western gale;' and expresses a charitable wish, that the enemies of the Roman state were exposed to the delights of both. He likens human misery to a sea 'roughened by gloomy winds;' 'to embark once more on the mighty sea,' is his figurative expression for once more engaging in the toils and troubles of the world; Rome, agitated by the dangers of civil conflict, resembles an ill-formed vessel labouring tempest-tossed in the waves; his implacable Myrtale resembles the angry Adriatic, in which also he finds a likeness to an ill-tempered lover. All through, from first to last, the gentle Horace pelts with most ungentle phrases one of the noblest objects in nature, provocative alike of our admiration and our awe, our terror and our love.

And even Shakspeare must be ranged in the same category. The most English of poets has not one laudatory phrase for

—– 'The seas
Which God hath given for fence impregnable'

to the poet's England. It is idle to say that Shakspeare was inland-bred—that he knew nothing, and could therefore have cared nothing about the matter—seeing that, insensible as he might have been to its beauties, he makes constant reference to the sea, and even in language implying that his familiarity with it was not inferior to that of any yachtsman who has ever sailed out of Cowes Harbour. He uses nautical terms frequently and appropriately. Romeo's rope-ladder is 'the high top-gallant of his joy;' King John, dying of poison, declares 'the tackle of his heart is cracked,' and 'all the shrouds wherewith his life should sail' wasted 'to a thread.' Polonius tells Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'—a technical expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage in King Lear, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat, and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the relative proportions of the objects named. In Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, sea-storms are made accessory to the development of the plot, and sometimes described with a force and truthfulness which forbid the belief that the writer had never witnessed such scenes: however, like Horace, it is in the darkest colours that Shakspeare uniformly paints 'the multitudinous seas.'

In the Winter's Tale, we read of—

—– 'the fearful usage
(Albeit ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune.'

In Henry V., of 'the furrowed sea,' 'the lofty surge,' 'the inconstant billows dancing;' in Henry VI., Queen Margaret finds in the roughness of the English waters a presage of her approaching wo; in Richard III., Clarence's dream figures to us all the horrors of 'the vasty deep;' in Henry VIII., Wolsey indeed speaks of 'a sea of glory,' but also of his shipwreck thereon; in The Tempest we read of 'the never surfeited sea,' and of the 'sea-marge sterile and rocky-hard;' in the Midsummer's Night Dream, 'the sea' is 'rude,' and from it the winds 'suck up contagious fogs;' Hamlet is as 'mad as the sea and wind;' the violence of Laertes and the insurgent Danes is paralleled to an irruption of the sea, 'overpeering of his list;' in the well-known soliloquy is the expression, 'a sea of troubles,' which, in spite of Pope's suggested and tasteless emendation, commentators have shewn to have been used proverbially by the Greeks, and more than once by Æschylus and Menander. Still, Shakspeare, again like Horace, was not insensible to the merits of sea-air in a sanitary point of view. Dionyza, meditating Marina's murder, bids her take what the Brighton doctor's call 'a constitutional' by the sea-side, adding that—

—– 'the air is quick there,
Piercing and sharpens well the stomach.'

As to Burns, his most fervent admirer can scarcely complain when we involve him in the censure to which we have already subjected Horace and Shakspeare. He, too, writes about the sea in such a fashion, that we should hardly have suspected, what is true, that he was born almost within hearing of its waves; that much of his life was passed on its shores or near them, and that at a time of life when external objects most vividly impress themselves on the senses, and exercise the largest influence on the taste.

The genius of 'Old Coila,' in sketching the poet's early life, says—

'I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar;'

but few tokens of this 'delight' are to be observed in his poetry. He has, indeed, his allusions to 'tumbling billows' and 'surging foam;' to southern climes where 'wild-meeting oceans boil;' to 'life's rough ocean' and 'life's stormy main;' to 'hard-blowing gales;' to the 'raging sea,' 'raging billows,' 'boundless oceans roaring wide,' and the like; but these are the stock-metaphors of every poet, and would be familiar to him even had he never overpassed the frontiers of Bohemia.

One sea-picture, and one alone, is to be found in Burns, and this, it is freely admitted, is exquisite:

'Behold the hour, the boat arrive;
Thou goest, thou darling of my heart!
Severed from thee, can I survive?
But fate has willed, and we must part.
I'll often greet this surging swell,
Yon distant isle will often hail:
E'en here I took the last farewell;
There latest marked her vanished sail.

Along the solitary shore,
While flitting sea-fowl round me cry,
Across the rolling, dashing roar,
I'll westward turn my wistful eye:
Happy thou Indian grove, I'll say,
Where now my Nancy's path may be!
While through thy sweets she loves to stray,
Oh! tell me, does she muse on me?'