Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 374, December, 1846

Look unharm'd on pretty pages.
Now, may paupers "raise the wind,"
Now, may score the great undined.
Now, unblamed, may tender pairs
Give themselves the tenderest airs.
Now, may half-pay sons of Mars
Look in freedom through their bars,
Though upon a Bench reclined,
England, in thy march of Mind.

Soon we'll hear our "London cries"
Dulcified to harmonies;
Mackerel sold in canzonets,
Milkmen "calling," in duets.
Postmen's bells no more shall bore us,
When their clappers ring in chorus.
Ears no more shall start at, Dust O!
When the thing is done with gusto.
E'en policemen grow refined,
England, in thy march of Mind.

Song shall settle Church and State,
Song shall supersede debate.
Owlet Joe no more shall screech,
We shall make him sing his speech.
Even the Iron Duke's "sic volo"
Shall be soften'd to a solo.
Discords then shall be disgrace,
Statesmen shall play thorough base;
Whigs and Tories intertwined,
England, in thy march of Mind.

Sailors, under canvass stiff,
Now no more shall dread a cliff.
From Bombay to Coromandel,
The Faqueers shall chorus Handel.
Arab sheik, and Persian maiden,
Simpering serenades from Haydn.
Crossing then the hemisphere,
Jonathan shall chant Auber,
All his love of pelf resign'd,
England, to thy march of Mind.

– Still moving on, still passing multitudinous agglomerations of brick, mortar, stone, and iron, rather than houses. – Docks crowded with masts, thicker than they ever grew in a pine forest, and echoing with the sounds of hammers, cranes, forges and enginery, making anchors for all the ships of ocean, rails for all the roads of earth, and chain-cables for a dozen generations to come. In front of one of those enormous forges, which, with its crowd of brawny hammerers glaring in the illumination of the furnace, gave me as complete a representation of the Cyclops and their cave, as any thing that can be seen short of the bowels of Ætna; stood a growing church, growing of iron; the walls were already half-way grown up. I saw them already pullulating into windows, a half-budded pulpit stood in the centre, and a Gothic arch was already beginning to spread like the foliage of a huge tree over the aisle. It was intended for one of the colonies, ten thousand miles off.

As the steamer is not suffered in this part of the river to run down boats at the rate of more than five miles an hour; I had leisure to see the operation. While I gazed, the roof had leaved; and my parting glance showed me the whole on the point of flourishing among the handsomest specimens of civic architecture.

In front of another forge stood a lighthouse; it was consigned to the West Indies. Three of its stone predecessors had been engulfed by earthquakes, a fourth had been swept off by a hurricane. This was of iron, and was to defy all the chances of time and the elements, by contract, for the next thousand years. It was an elegant structure, built on the plan of the "Tower of the Winds." Every square inch of its fabric, from the threshold to the vane, was iron! "What will mankind come to," said George Canning, "in fifty years hence? The present age is impudent enough, but I foresee that the next will be all Irony and Raillery."

But all here is a scene of miracle. In our perverseness we laugh at our "Lady of Loretto," and pretend to doubt her house being carried from Jerusalem on the backs of angels. But what right have I to doubt, where so many millions are ready to take their oaths to the fact? What is it to us how many angels might be required for the operation? or how much their backs may have been galled in the carriage? The result is every thing. But here we have before our sceptical eyes the very same result. We have St Catherine's hospital, fifty times the size, transported half-a-dozen miles, and deposited in the Regent's Park. The Virgin came alone. The hospital came, with all its fellows, their matrons, and their master. The virgin-house left only a solitary excavation in a hillside. The hospital left a mighty dock, filled with a fleet that would have astonished Tyre and Sidon, buildings worthy of Babylon, and a population that would have sacked Persepolis.

But, what is this strangely shaped vessel, which lies anchored stem and stern in the centre of the stream, and bearing a flag covered over with characters which as we pass look like hieroglyphics? The barge which marks the Tunnel. We are now moving above the World's Wonder! A thousand men, women, and children, have marched under that barge's keel since morning; lamps are burning fifty feet under water, human beings are breathing, where nothing but the bones of a mammoth ever lay before, and check-takers are rattling pence, where the sound of coin was never heard since the days of the original Chaos.

What a field for theory! What a subject for a fashionable Lecturer! What a topic for the gossipry of itinerant science, telling us (on its own infallible authority) how the globe has been patched up for us, the degenerated and late-born sons of Adam! How glowingly might their fancy lucubrate on the history of the prior and primitive races which may now be perforating the interior strata of the globe – working by their own gas-light, manufacturing their own metals, and, from their want of the Davy-lamp, (and of an Act of Parliament, to make it burn,) producing those explosions which we call earthquakes, while our volcanoes are merely the tops of their chimneys!

I gave the Tunnel a parting aspiration —

The Tunnel

Genii of the Diving-bell!
Sing Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l,
Whether ye parboil in steam,
Whether float in lightning's beam,
Whether in the Champs Elysés
Dance ye, like Carlotta Grisi.
Take your trumps, the fame to swell,
Of Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l.

Phantoms of the fiery crown!
Plunged ten thousand fathoms down
In the deep Pacific's wave,
In the Ocean's central cave,
Where the infant earthquakes sleep,
Where the young tornadoes creep.
Chant the praise, where'er ye dwell,
Of Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l.

What, if Green's Nassau balloon
(Ere its voyage to the moon)
'Twixt Vauxhall and Stepney plies,
Straining London's million eyes,
Dropping on the breezes bland,
(Good for gazers,) bags of sand;
Green's a blacksmith to a belle,
To Sir Is-mb-rt Br-n-l.

Great magician of the Tunnel!
Earth bows down before thy funnel,
Darting on through swamp and crag,
Faster than a Gaul can brag;
All Newmarket's tip-top speed,
To thy stud is broken-knee'd;
Zephyr spavin'd, lightning slow,
To thy fiery rush below.

Ships no more shall trust to sails,
Boats no more be swamp'd by whales,
Sailors sink no more in barks,
(Built by contract with the sharks,)
Though the tempest o'er us roar;