The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1844-04-09 00:00:00

Etteraturr.

POETRY.

THE PRIMROSE AND FORGET-ME-NOT.

BY MISS CHRISTIANA WELLER.

Where sun-beams crept and gaily danc.2d,
In sp rtive light, on al' ar nod;
Where trembling moon-beams often glanced
Along the fairy-ha b.vy'd.round.

A pritnros, blos,om'il to the day,
Of sweetest perfume, palest dye:
The infant Howe 'mid green leaves lay,
And z,phyrs san, its lullaby.

And time pass'd on, and gently dealt
With this fair token of the spring;
The chilling blast it scarcely felt, -
'Twas fann'd as by a seraph's wing

But o'er it Pity shower'd her dew,
In falling drops of crystal light:
For well the tearful mourner knew
That fleeting—frail, was its delighs,

E.-eh morning-ray dispelled the gloom
That hung upon the fair one's cheek ;
The golden beam rest,red its bloom,
And painted it with beauty meek.

And noontide's fervour harm'd it not;
A canopy of verdant shade
Threw freshest charms around the spot :
Hope NV, isper'd that it ne'er should fade.

Another flow'ret blossom'd nigh,
And, mingling fondly. thus they grew;
For friendship lent her sympathy,
And sweet companionship they knew.

They lived, they loved in after days,
As, one by one, each joy decay'd
When summer's sun withdrew its rays,
And winds the darkening skies obey'd.

When each fond dream that youth had shown
And pictured, fair as earth could know,
In one sad hour had vanish'd—flown,
And desolation left below.

The primrose heard the night winds sigh,
And read its doom amid the storm ;
Unbroken only was the tie
That friendship threw around its form :

And. whispefing sweetly from its bower,
Ere yet had closed its cheerless lot,
It named its g ntle sister flower,
And, dying, said—" Forget-me-not 1"

" SITTING ON A RAIL,"
THE LL'S TUNNEL.

Hark ! the shrill whistle runs up the L— tunnel—the
rope is adjusted—the cap fits roundly upon your head, in-
stead of your hat—the gleaming red oil light gives its
sickly hue to the book in your hand or the face of your
vis-a-vis companion. Slow—slowly—less slowly the car-
riages move on till they break at last into a run, with a
rattle, and you are rattled through the dark future, and
are only glad that you have already escaped the murky
gloom of the sabled past, whilst each successive moment
becomes in its turn one of present conflict with the powers
of darkness, until the blue light of day gradually expands
before you at the tunnel's mouth, with phantasmagoric
effect and welcome ! Another scream of the whistle, which
like some fabled bird of darkness, throws all its lungs into
the loudest embodiment of a hideous sound, distressfully
shrill, and seems to rejoice in thus fitfully celebrating the
praises of its birth-place. Spirits are generally seen ;
thou, tunnel-bird! art only heard, and never seen ; and
thy wings must have the stilly flight of thy living and vi-
sible prototype, the hooting and noiseless owl, or in the
gliding whirl of the many wheels, as they skim over the
expectant rail, we should sometimes hear them flap and
flutter. Thou art truly the creation of the engineer! a
Prometheus offspring of his steam and smoke—a being
embodied in sound only—invisible—untangible, whilst thy
wiry claws scratch at our ear-drums till they are ready to
bleed again under the vexatious infliction : yet we know
not thy ugly form—too ugly to be revealed perhaps—
though we can note down with the accuracy of astonish-
ment the fiery octaves and the wild wolf-note' of thy
murderous din ! A music so severe and spiteful, though
blunted in the enshrining column of steam, must owe its
origir., and that in the nineteenth century, to the tunnel
of out of whose sombre bowels, oh, Earth! that
such a fossil echo should ever have been dug!
Whirl—whirled upon a rail, through the green fields—
below, above—like the Shaksperian witch—
" Thorough water,
Thorough fire,
Thorough brake,
Thorough brier"—

how we do go along, "sitting on a rail"—quaking over moss
and swinging down " inclines;" and after a short look-
out beneath, over canals and race-courses out-sped every
hour by the exploits of subjugated steam, the giant town
of M— spreads out its swarthy arms to welcome us to
its heaving bosom, whence are belching daily forth clouds
of smoke and vapour of smoke—contracted for by the
whole island of Great Britain, as to be furnished at the
rate of a cubic mile per second, of the best black Egyptian
—warranted, as per sample, to contain a variable supply
of smuts of the true jetty hue. Well, but leave M— to
itself, for gold dust and cotton refinements; look what
airy picture sits like a marine refraction, on the terminus
of a bridge which spans the Stygian river, whose dusky
red sides must have been bathed in the thin red tide of
the manufactured and manufacturing victims.
Ah! this L— terminus is a gem of a place, set picto-
rially in the jetty frame of mill-work—a pleasing fresco on
an ancient wall—a fair relief in cast-iron—a picture in iron
and glass, standing out from the hieroglyphic spinning-
jennies of countless numbers around, plied by incessant
bands, and as under Egyptian rigour doing a service " without
straw." Here the rail has a rope for a fringe or tassel to
pull up by; but then there is no tunnel wherein to take
leave of your senses " chem ',ant." There is some-
thing pictorial, too, and ente in the construction and
nomenclature of some of their carriages : a fine " Divan"
for those who divert in smoke; a " Gondola" for pic-nic
parties and associated groups; and finally, a " Tourist"
for the summer season, when pedestrians and butterflies are
out, the former not liking to be inclosed and entombed in a
first or second-class carriage, may in this carriage gaze
around and above to the heart's content, for they are only
" glazed in" in these directions, though their correspond-
ence below is intercepted by a platform of wood, which is
far more satisfactory than if they were invited to a glass
seat and foot-stool likewise, as in a diving-bell, especially
since they are about to dive into numerous cuttings and
tunnels where from any accidental fidgittiness on their
seat, it would be a very hard arid irrecoverable penalty to
be left behind, the victims of a glass seat and cushion.
First we come to " blue pits," which are anything but
blue, though dyers might wish they were so; in fact, we
don't understand the name, but suppose it an accidental
misnomer in the first instance, arid now kept up because
it is not so. The sky is not blue ; how then could the wa-
ter be ? and we defy all the powers of Prussian blue to
make it so, A little further on we did see some "red"
cloth hanging out to dry, and it was the most pictorial
thing in the district ; but we are ready to go before a ma-
gistrate and aver, that blue was a scarce commodity, ex-
cept inside our carriage, and that of a flashing order in the
" bonnie blue e'en" of the little school-girl in the rail arm-
chair opposite to us, whose merry pranks and laughter
often quickened our own dull circulation.
There were sheep, too, further on, but they should have
been white, and yet they were not " black sheep," that
orthodox variety, we mean, of " ovis," but they were bor-
dering on black—the best iron-grey we ever saw, and as
such we should have set them down in our " notes of
rails," but the lambs at their sides frisked about in such
white little jackets as at the same time to puzzle and
please ourselves, and to discredit their dams somehow or
other !

What means " Shut off your steam," unless it signifies
" bottle up your courage" paraphrastically; it will be
very likely wanted anyhow; for you are approaching the
L. tunnel, and there is no escape, so it's no use wishing it.
Bottle up your courage, then, and " keep your powder
dry." We were sitting reading our newspaper, when all
at once ascream from our invisible courier bird alarmed our
weak nerves and presaged—what! darkness—and coldness.
and horrors! The lettered page remained in our rivetted
bands a blank page—the sides of our carriage were obli-
terated in our vision, and the region beyond the
window shot past into darkness, and the stone sleepers
jarred and rattled, and the disembowelled tones rung
from the vaulted tunnel's roof, and pressed down ruth-
lessly on our ear, even through the roof of our carriages,
until those two organs of sense, eye and ear, gave up in
despair their straining contest with din and darkness, and
we sat captive and mute, astonished and dumbfounded—
rattle and jar from the awakened sleepers—roar of the en-
gine condensed in the arched domain—chill from the im-
prisoned damp air trickling from the weeping sides—casual
fits of shriek from the unseen friend—palpable darkness to
the hand outstretched from the windows—silence within,
not a foot or hand stirring from where each traveller last
bad them—scarcely a breath drawn, and when taken
drawn inaudibly for certain—the heart recoiled back upon
itself, the bottled-up courage flagged and fainted—mo-
ments extended their ordinary brief length into prolix mi-
nutes, and still on we went, and rattled and whizzed with
fearful rapidity, till thought lost its elasticity of wonder-
ment, and sullenly retired within. its cell, to try and sleep
out the rest of this plunge into darkness, but in vain.
Lo ! the angry flare of a burning torch upheld by one solitary
denizen of this awful gutting, stretched out at arm's length,
and waved to and fro, seemed like a welcome to our arri-
val at the dark gates themselves which usher into Ache-
rontic regions ! Not a question but now
we were ushering
into the postern-gate of Pluto's state-prison andcitadel;
soon—the next moment probably—earth and its busy
scenes would have been left behind for ever, and the irre-
vocable plunge made into the depths of the lake from
whence no mortal had ever been suffered to upspring back
again to earth. Here joys sublunary and griefs terrestrial
were to be drowned alike in the molten elements below,
where even oblivion of the past was to be denied—the last
solacedenied to thewick ed—and every past was tobe rivetted
and chained in the brazen mirror of immortality ! Father
Time seemed to be niggardly counting out his last sands,
whilst we recounted them over too, lest he should serve us,
out with short allowance of our seconds. Boz would
have "declined" our position with "ghostly" skill into
past, present, and future ten.se,l! e begun roundly
with the perfect past— A ; we tried the present,
" Amo," but it faltered on our tongue ; and the future
" Amaho," stuck in our throat as a fiction of diseased
imagination ; and the echoing sounds of " Peccavi "
" Miserere mei," seemed to fit alone the region we
ap-
proached so moodily.
" Half of our heavy task was done,"

however, and that " by the light of the torch so fitfully
burning." Onwards still rolled our rapid wheels, and
other pangs of suspense screwed up our very vitals into
nothing; and—just when minutes of agony has drawn uut
their laggard length alone, and the mind had made it-
self up for the worst, and had given up all idea of doine its
best, even it it were to realise a calamity—a flare of light