Onwards, onwards, I float.

The smoke and glare, the confused roar and tumult of a manufacturing town spread all around; sounds of voices ascend past me into the silent supernal blue.

In the tobacco factory amid rows of girls, with my little bit of mirror or comb concealed in a nook of my bench—I sit—or photograph placed where I can see it as I work;

Or in the printing office of the daily paper—printing reports of law-courts and cricket-matches—I scramble with five or six others to the boxes for a fat take.

* * * * *

The long trial is over, and I am the prisoner on whom sentence has been pronounced.

The judge in scarlet and ermine, preceded by liveried heralds blowing trumpets, strides down the corridors and through the crowd thronging the steps of the Town Hall, into his blue and silver paneled coach;

Hustled and thumped and buffeted by the police, I am fetched from the dock by underground passages to the prison van, and bumped through the streets to the gaol—there to await my execution.

* * * * *

Pale and desperate in the cutlery buffing shop boys and girls bend over their wheels;

In squalor and monotony the winter daylight through dirty windows dawns and dies away again upon them;

In squalor and monotony the light of youth and of hope dawns and dies away again from their eyes;

The master looks round with his hands in his pockets, well satisfied;

The cheap goods ready to fall to pieces as soon as used are duly packed and despatched to African and Pacific Island traders.

* * * * *

Civilisation plays its part in the history of each nation and each individual,

Unerringly the time of its unfoldment to each arrives, and again the time of its dismissal and departure.

* * * * *

Brawny figures move to and fro in the iron works, halfseen through clouds of flying steam or against the glare of furnaces;

The flame of the Bessemer cupola roars, with showers of sparks, and rattling of cranes, and shouts of men;

The foreman stands calmly aside, spectroscope in hand, or gives a signal with uplifted arm;

I see the reversing of the cupola, and the outpour of molten steel, lilac with yellowing vapor around it;

The rose-colored shafts of sunlight through the high roof, the terraces and platforms, the glints and halos amid the vapor;

The balcony where the men stand with their hydraulic handles controlling the huge lifts and cranes beneath them;

The groups steadying with iron poles and hooks the great lifted ingots of steel, or regulating the outflow of liquid stuff into the moulds;

The man in a corner washing his shoulders and head in a bucket of water;

The steam-hammers, the blocks of yellow-hot iron shimmering in the heated air;

The steel-melter’s men around the crucibles with their tongs—their feet and legs swathed in rags to keep off the heat, their sweat-handkerchiefs held between their teeth;

The daring, recklessness even at times, the delight in the power and endurance—the drink, gross talk, rough jokes—throwing the great pressures upon the novices or shamming to pick quarrels with them;

The planing and cutting of armor-plates, the huge resistless steam-driven machinery, the gouges and drills,

The shaping of the plates (each one numbered) to the lines of the ships they are intended for—the careful drawing and planning, and following out of the plans;

The transporting of them to the sea-coast, the riveting of them each in its place;

And the floating away of these thousands of tons over the ocean and round the bend of the world.

* * * * *

And he at the forge streaming with sweat, the striker, with bared breast, turning out claw-hammer heads by the score,

Keeps dreaming and dreaming all day between the strokes, of love which is to come and change our earth into heaven;

But his brother who works with him laughs at his dreams—and the spring comes in the woods to all alike:

The gnarled oak breaks into pale yellow buds against the blue, the mouse stirs under the dry grass, and the corn-crake runs with head erect among the young green blades of corn.