Steam has ruined a great many things for us, and spoiled much poetry that was good and true in its time. The songs of the fireside to myriads are dead songs. What do they know about hearths and hickory, of backstick and forestick and topstick, and a great, cheerful fire, with a human smile and a human companionship in it, who camp around an unilluminated hole in the floor, and feel a gust of hot air like a simoon? Did you ever sit before a fireplace in a fall night—an eccentric philologist says that "autumn" is a better word than "fall"!—with somebody you owned to loving very much; sat an hour without speaking, and looked into the fire, you and he, you and she, and yet it seemed to you as if you had been talking all the while? It was the fire! No couple can sit and think thus around that defective spot in the floor, and enjoy it, unless they are idiots. Then steam has ruined the Iambic poetry of the flails, and substituted therefor a gigantic smut-machine, that runs wild in the field, and puts people's eyes out, and gives them the consumption, and burns up the wheat stack, and blows up the engineer. Where is your champion cradler, that went in with his skeleton fingers and laid out the grain becomingly, after a Christian fashion? Dead. Steam killed him. And what has become of the reaper, and Longfellow's, and everybody else's poetry about him? Cut to pieces with knives, ground fine with wheels.

The clean and blessed fists that kneaded the dough after a pugilistic fashion in the old days, and moulded it into an eloquent answer to one of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, have forgotten their cunning—steamed to death. Enter a Mechanical Bakery. Steam has bewitched everything. Yonder are three, five, eight barrels of flour tumbling about in a mass of dough that would crush a district school, teacher and all. No hands. There are doors opening in the two-story oven, and cars laden with bread and crackers come rolling out on a railroad track, and the doors close behind them. No hands. Yonder runs a train in at an open door. It will stay in the hot chamber twenty minutes, and come out of its own accord. The engine has burned up the rolling-pin and the moulding-board, and the big wooden cradle wherein they kept the dough warm till it "rose" like any other member of the family; the fork wherewith the blessed biscuits and the mince-pies were tattooed like New Zealanders is thrown away, and the knife that marked the old oval shortcakes thus, #, and without which household monogram shortcakes were not shortcakes, has followed the fork.

When they kindled a fire within the ribs of oak, and sent the steamer panting around the world, the old tradition of the ship was scalded to death. No more the tall masts cloud up, as the sky clouds, at the captain's word of command. No more does the breath of his trumpet roll up the piles of sails, volume above volume, and the nimble blue-jackets perched aloft swing themselves along the ratlines, and cling to nothing, like so many garden-spiders in their webs. It is a mimic storm of canvas, with Jack-tars instead of angels playing "in the plighted clouds!" Take a full-rigged ship, showing everything she can carry, and dressed in her best bunting, and watch her with a glass as she comes up into the horizon and stands squarely upon the visible sea, courtesying her way into the harbor like a highborn dame of the olden time! It is the stateliest thing, so far, of man's making.

Read of the naval battles that went long ago into song and story; of the great admirals; of Nelson and the rest; of the masterly manoeuvering of McDonough and Perry and all the dead Commodores that have made lake and sea memorable, when they spread their great wings and swooped down upon the enemy like sea-eagles. It is grand to think of. No machinery below deck grinding away like a mill; nothing aboard but the capstan, to heave in the cables and bring the anchors home. It must have been something worth while to float a broad pennant from a seventy-four, manned with a thousand men! Steam and wheels have succeeded to the old glories, and when you see a low-quartered crocodile of a thing, black, unseemly, hugging the water, and with a dingy-looking drum upon its back, never despise it! There is no telling what it can do. It is a turreted monitor in an iron jacket, and carries a gun so preposterously large, that it is not a boat with a gun in it, but a gun with a boat to it. It rips up your seventy-four as a rhinoceros an elephant, and sneaks about under the guns unscathed.

Of guns: those Woolwich infants, as they call them with a sort of grim facetiousness, that will throw eight hundred pounds of iron seven miles! As far as you can trot a horse comfortably in an hour. Couldn't they be used to move an iron-mine from one country to another? These devices, that steam and wheels are at the bottom of, brought into the service of Mars and his tomahawk of a sister, Bellona, never seemed to me so much the square and fair implements of manly warfare, as infernal machines that ought to be gathered up and packed away in the basement of John Milton's "Paradise Lost," with their makers just inside the door to keep watch lest somebody should steal them! Then, again, wheels are doing their best to trundle an exquisite Scriptural picture out of fashion. Ships flock not so much "like doves to the windows," as tremendous forges afloat, with their pillared smokes on high; the very cloud that came out of the little bottle and took shape, and was the greatest of the Genii in the Arabian Nights.