The new purchase - Mid-American frontier Author:Baynard Rush Hall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII. "Ferrum exercebant vasto Cyclopes in antro Brontesque Steropesque et nudus membra Pyracmon. alii ventosis follibus auras. "Accipiunt r... more »edduntque: alii stridentio tingunt Aera lacu: gemit impositis incudibus antrum. Illi inter sese multa vi brachia tollunt In numerum, versantque tenaci forcipe massam." And be assured, reader, it is not "all smoke" you now see— there is some fire here too. This black place reminds us of the iron-age—of Jupiter too, and Vulcan and Mount . £tna. Virgil would here have found Cyclops and pounders of red-hot thunderbolts sonorous enough to set at work in his musical hexameters. And some here make tubes of iron, with alternate and spiral "lands and furrows," better by far to shoot than Milton's grand and unpatent blunder-busses; into which his heroic devils put unscientifically more powder than probably all burned—but that was before the Lyceum age. Whenever that soot-cloud is driven before a wind, long streets are revealed lined with well-built and commodious dwellings, with here and there a stately mansion, and even the dusky palace belonging to some lord of coal-pits and ore-beds. Hark! how enterprise and industry are raging away!—while steam and water-power shake the hills to their very foundation!— and every spot is in a ferment with innumerable workmen as busy, and as dingy too, as the pragmatical insects in Virgil's poetic ant-hill! Every breeze is redolent with nameless odours of factories and work-shops; and the ear is stunned by the ceaseless uproar from clatter and clang of cog and wheel—the harsh grating of countless rasps and files—the ringing of a thousand anvils—the spiteful clickings of enormous shears biting rods of iron into nails—the sissing of hot-tongs in water—and the deep earthquaking bass of forg...« less