The poet stands on a hill from which he can see the effect of the united work of the army of men who are engaged in the construction: perhaps a hundred thousand forced laborers, under the control of the legionary soldiers who act as the engineers. He makes us see and hear with him the tens of thousands of stone cutters and the ring of their tools squaring the "setts"; and then one platoon after another stepping forward and laying down its row of stones followed by rank after rank of men with the paviours' rammers, which rise and fall at the sweep of the band-master's rods, keeping time in a stately music as they advance; the continuous falling and crashing of the trees as other thousands of hands ply the axes along the lines, that creep, slowly, but visibly, on through the Forest that no foot had ever trodden—the thud of the multitudinous machines driving the piles in the marshy spaces; the whole innumerable sounds falling on the ear like the roaring of a great and vast sea.
The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness, in one day, of an iron way that shall last for all time.
We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.
"I intended to ask you just now whether the man you spoke to in the road was a typical native of the district?" said Senator Hoar. "He was dark and swarthy, with very black hair and piercing eyes; not at all like the majority of people we see in Gloucester for instance." "Yes, he is a typical Forester"; exactly such a man as Tacitus describes his Silurian ancestors; so Spanish in appearance that he tries to account for it by remarking that "that part of Britain lies over against Spain"; as if it was such a short run across the Bay of Biscay to the upper end of the Bristol Channel that nothing would be more natural than for Spaniards to sail over here with their wives and families and become Silures!
These Western Britons, both here in the Forest and in Cornwall certainly remind one of Spaniards. The type is of an older Celtic than that of the present Welsh people proper, as some evidences in the language also point to the occupation being an older one. With respect to this particular district of the Forest and the East of Monmouthshire, one more element must not be left out of the account; and that is, that Caerleon was founded by the second legion being removed to it from Gloucester about the time this road was made; and that it remained for three hundred years the headquarters of that legion, which was a Spanish one raised in the time of Augustus. Forty years ago I remember being at Caerleon (two and one half miles from Newport), when I met the children of the village coming out of school. It was hard to believe they were not Spanish or Italian!
At all events this part of Britain lies over against Boston; and Americans can cross over and see Caerleon for themselves more easily than the people could, of whom Tacitus wrote.
INDEX [omitted]
[Transcriber's notes:
Typed into MS-DOS Editor under Windows XP, using 7-bit characters only. Several errors of punctuation or of single letters have been corrected. The author uses both "contemporary" and "cotemporary."
The Latin has not been checked for spelling, grammar, or sense.
The one Greek quotation (of two words) has been omitted.