in chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to be
exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops
and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal
ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial
islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom
of the deep. Give him "three hundred thousand dollars and ten years'
time," and he would undertake to do the work.

Wrong, pain, and sin, being in his view but the results of our physical
necessities, ill-gratified desires, and natural yearnings for a better
state, were to vanish before the millennium of mechanism. "It would
be," said he, "as ridiculous then to dispute and quarrel about the means
of life as it would be now about water to drink by the side of mighty
rivers, or about permission to breathe the common air." To his mind the
great forces of Nature took the shape of mighty and benignant spirits,
sent hitherward to be the servants of man in restoring to him his lost
paradise; waiting only for his word of command to apply their giant
energies to the task, but as yet struggling blindly and aimlessly,
giving ever and anon gentle hints, in the way of earthquake, fire, and
flood, that they are weary of idleness, and would fain be set at work.
Looking down, as I now do, upon these huge brick workshops, I have
thought of poor Etzler, and wondered whether he would admit, were he
with me, that his mechanical forces have here found their proper
employment of millennium making. Grinding on, each in his iron harness,
invisible, yet shaking, by his regulated and repressed power, his huge
prison-house from basement to capstone, is it true that the genii of
mechanism are really at work here, raising us, by wheel and pulley,
steam and waterpower, slowly up that inclined plane from whose top
stretches the broad table-land of promise?

Many of the streets of Lowell present a lively and neat aspect, and are
adorned with handsome public and private buildings; but they lack one
pleasant feature of older towns,--broad, spreading shade-trees. One
feels disposed to quarrel with the characteristic utilitarianism of the
first settlers, which swept so entirely away the green beauty of Nature.
For the last few days it has been as hot here as Nebuchadnezzar's
furnace or Monsieur Chabert's oven, the sun glaring down from a copper
sky upon these naked, treeless streets, in traversing whic