Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/241

for thirty shillings a week. These people about me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men and women—to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them, to the capitalist so many "hands," and to the City man generally so many "helpless pieces of the game he plays" up there in spidery nooks and corners of the City.

As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that behind the long glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels of mighty ships—an expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the dumb tossing steel, sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it there seems something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something like a sense of pity surprises one—a sense of pity that anything in the world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say, senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine houses! Will the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that? or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows? These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not for a poet, who is too much terrified by these forces to be able calmly to estimate and prophesy concerning them.

Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of "one poor poet's scroll" ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little"private