impses can be had of interior life and character. Primitive simplicity
is altogether incompatible with railroads. The boy who resides near a
station is quite an old man, compared with any average boy taken from
the sequestered clearings ten miles back: he may be a worse kind of boy,
or he may be a better, but he isn't the same kind, at any rate. Of
girls it is more difficult to speak with confidence in the present
era,--hooped skirts having pretty nearly assimilated them everywhere;
but I have noticed that they are less ingenuous along railroads than in
secluded districts, and their parents more suspicious,--a fact which
makes railroad-vicinities inferior places to dwell in, compared to those
that are rural and remote from the demoralizing influences of up and
down trains.

I do not aver that the railroad is devoid of a kind of poetry of its
own,--the same kind of sentiment, nearly, that resides about anvils
and smelting-furnaces in the Hartz Mountains and in the great
coal-districts: an infernal kind of sentiment, for the most part, being
inseparable from burning fiery furnaces and grime; as in "Fridolin," and
in the "Song of the Bell," and in the "Forging of the Anchor." Once,
particularly, in travelling by rail, did I experience the mysterious
glamour that seems to hang round iron more than about any other metal.
It was past midnight; and on waking up after a sleep of some hours, I
found myself alone in the long car, which had come to a stand-still
while I slept. The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a
short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic
from the incomprehensible unseen. On looking out of the window, I saw by
some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; _we_, I
say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose
gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the
great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train,
striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went. Of course
there was nothing unusual in such a proceeding, the object of which was,
probably, to ascertain something connected with the condition of the
rolling stock; but there was a kind of awful poetry in the toll of the
iron bell, which ran, and reverberated, and tingled among the iron ribs
in the building, making them all sing as if they were things of flesh
and blood, with plenty of iron in the latter, which is reckoned to be