GOLD STREET WAREHOUSES.
Had it been possible for any human intellect, at the close of the eighteenth century, or the commencement of this its nineteenth successor, so to grasp and comprehend the development of science, its expansion and diffusion, and, above all, its application to the every-day wants and conveniences of ordinary human life, as to predict, only fifty years beforehand, any one of the almost incredible marvels which have long ceased to move especial wonder, as being now established facts, witnessed by all eyes, and of occurrence at all hours, the owner of that intellect would not have been merely laughed at as a crazy, crack-brained enthusiast, but would have run a very reasonable chance of being consigned to the cell of a madhouse, as an incorrigible and incurable monomaniac.
The writer of these lines, lacking several years yet of the completion of his tenth lustre, clearly remembers how, within thirty years at furthest, to assert an opinion of the feasibility of lighting streets by gas was to be sneered at for a visionary, or regarded with suspicion as a probable speculator in the fancy, even by the best informed, and most enlightened classes.
To the youngest of his readers the dictum of the then infallible Doctor Dionysius Lardner against the possibility of Ocean Steam Navigation—for, deny it now as he may, he can be clearly convicted of its utterance—is familiar as a household word.
And now, what insignificant town, to say nothing of innumerable private dwellings, innumerable factories and workshops, prison houses, as it were, and ergasteria, would it were otherwise! of plebeian labor, innumerable theatres, assembly-halls, and banquet-rooms, abodes of patrician pleasure, are not ablaze through the murkiest midnight, and light as the broadest day, with the released and radiant spirit, that lay so long enthralled and unsuspected in the hard heart of the swart coal mine?
And now, with what quarter of the world are we not in daily, if not hourly, communication by the united agencies of those two most irreconcilable powers, fire and water?
Hardly one century has elapsed since the American Franklin revealed to the admiring world the scarcely suspected fact, that the subtle spark elicited from the electrifying magazine, or from the hairs of a cat, rubbed contrariwise to their direction, is identical with the sovereign, all-pervading flash,
“Which issues from the loaded cloud,
And rives the oak asunder.”
And now, at this day, we sit quietly engaged in our study, or stand, even, as it may be, laboriously plying our trade of manual labor, and send that very lightning-flash, a tamed domestic influence, nay, but a very slave and pack-horse to our will, to speed our tidings to New Orleans, or to Newfoundland, and to bring us back the answer, before a second hour has lagged round the dial.