I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile — a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this— who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will — feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little strain of watercolour, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else— mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? And What ought I to think of them?
(From The Cestus of Aglaia, 1865)
