Thus, good and evil are not unmixed. Either may be extracted, and leave the remainder, in appearance to us, a kind of caput mortuum.
It is far more pleasant to look to the peaceful results of inventions—to hear the spirit that is in the electric fluid say—
"I will be correspondent to command,
And do my spiriting gently."
Let it be the means that far-off friends at the Antipodes shall communicate, if not by voice, by that which is like it—by sound and by lettered words. Let it touch a bell at their mid-day, and it may tingle at that instant in your ears at midnight, and awake you to receive, evolved from the little machinery at your bed's head, a letter in a printed strip, conveying "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," even as though you felt the breath that uttered them. Reader, be not sceptical. How many very practicable things have you denied, and yet found brought tangibly before your eyes, and into your hands! This simultaneous tingle of two bells—one at the Antipodes, and one within reach of your own touch, and at your own ear—may cause you to curl your lip in derision; but say, is it impossible? We have heard you say of much more improbable things, "Where there is a will there is a way." Well, here it is evident you have only a little to strengthen your will, and the length of the way will be no obstacle. You may amuse yourself with the idea, and make a comparison of it, and look at the figures on your China plate, and imagine them moved to each other under spell of their passion, (see the tale of the willow pattern,) to the defiance of all the ordinary rules of distance. Did not the foreseeing artist intimate thereby that love and friendship have no space-limits, and hold within themselves a power that laughs at perspective, as it does "at locksmiths?" The artist whom you contemned as ignorant was, you acknowledge, wise—wise beyond his art, if not beyond his thought. He had a second-sight of a new mode of communication, and expressed it prudently in this his hieroglyphic.
Does any marvel exceed this in apparent absurdity—that you, in London or Edinburgh, shall be able to communicate instantaneously with your friend or relative at St Petersburg or Vienna; for which purpose you have but to touch a few keys denoting letters of the alphabet, and under water and over land your whole thoughts pass as soon as your fingers have delivered them to the keys—nay, the letters are forestalling your thought, and those before it? Does it not seem very absurd to say that all the foreign news may be at your breakfast-table, fresh from every capital in Europe, before the Times can be published and circulated? How will the practice of the press be affected by this novelty? "The latest intelligence" becomes a bygone tale, "flat, stale, and unprofitable." Far greater things than the poet dreamed of become daily realities. Richest in fancy, Shakspeare apologetically covers the incredible ubiquity of his Ariel with a sense of fatigue—of difficulty in his various passages—Ariel, the spirit who "thought it much to tread
The ooze of the salt deep."
Our Government officers will have ready on the instant, messengers far swifter than Ariel—wondrous performers on the "slack-wires." They will put you "A girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."
No; that was the lagging, loitering pace of the old spirit. It will not take forty seconds. What are thousands of miles to a second of time? Time is, as it were, annihilated: the sand in the glass must be accelerated, or the glass, held for ages, taken out of his hand, and some national exhibition ransacked for a new hour-instrument. The Prospero's wand broken, and newer wonders to be had for a trifle. Fortunatus's "wishing-cap" to be bought at the corner-shop, and the famed "seven-league boots" next door—and to be had cheap, considering, that you may tell all your thoughts, at ever so great a distance, by a little bell and a wire, while you are sitting in your armchair. It will be quite an easy matter to "Waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole."
Railroads and the Submarine Telegraph more than double man's life, if we count his years by action. History itself must now begin as from a new epoch. All the doings of the world, through this rapidity given to person and to thought, must be so altered as to bear no parallel with the past. The old locomotive and communicating powers are defunct—they are as the water that has passed the mill. It must grind with that which succeeds. They are new powers that must set the wheels of governments and of all the world's machinery in motion.
There is in the Spectator a paper of the true Addisonian wit, descriptive of an Antediluvian courtship, in which the young couple, having gone through the usual process in the early art of love, complete their happiness in the some hundredth year of their ages. Theorists have entertained the notion that this long life was bestowed upon man in the world's first era, that knowledge might be more readily transmitted, there being few generations to the Flood. To the lovers of life it would be a sad thing to be led to the conclusion, that, transmission being quickened, life will be shortened; or that, as in the winding-up of a drama, events are crowding into the last act of our earth's duration. It may relieve their apprehensions to read of the advance the medical science is making simultaneously with all other sciences, so that they may look to a state in which a man may live as long as he likes, and at the same time do ten times the work: a man's day will perhaps be a year, counting by his doings. Morose poets and philosophers have lamented over us as ephemeral; if so, we are at least like the Antediluvian butterflies, and our day long. And now, with all our sanitary inventions, it stands a fair chance of a tolerable lengthening.
We have observed that it has been said that the world is not fifteen years of age; and, indeed, it looks like enough. Hitherto Nature has treated us as a kind mother does her children—given us toys and playthings, to be broken and discarded as we get older. We are throwing them by, we are becoming of age, and Nature opens her secrets to us, and we are just setting up for ourselves—as it were, commencing the business of life, like grown men in good earnest; and every day we find out more secrets, and all worth knowing.
We will not lay down the pen without expressing our congratulations to the inventors of the Submarine Telegraph, the Messrs Brett, and wishing them the fullest success. They themselves as yet know not the extent of the reach of their own invention, or they might well wonder at their own wonders, like "Katerfelto, with his hair on end!"
We wish them long life to see the results—and that they will not, through mistrust of so great a discovery, imitate Copernicus, who, says Fontenelle, "distrusting the success of his opinions, was for a long time loth to publish them, and, when they brought him the first sheet of his work, died, foreseeing that he never should be able to reconcile all its contradictions, and therefore wisely slipped out of the way." Messrs Brett will think it wiser to live, and be in the way and at their post, (no post obit,) ready to answer all queries and contradictions, through the convincing, the very satisfactory means, of their "Submarine Telegraph."