There Was An Old Waggon Shown At The Royal Agricultural Show In London
Said To Be Two Hundred Years Old; Probably It Had Had So Many New Wheels,
And Shafts, And Sides, As To Have Physiologically Changed Its
Constitution - Still There Were Waggons In Those Days, And There Are
Waggons Now.
Express trains go by in a great hurry - the slow waggons
gather up the warm hay and the yellow wheat, just as they did hundreds of
years since.
The broad-browed oxen guided by the ancient goad draw the
old wooden plough over the slopes of the Downs, though the telegraph
wires are in sight. You may see men sowing broadcast just as they did a
thousand years ago on the broad English acres. Yet the light iron plough,
and the heavy drill with its four horses, the steam-plough, winnowing
machines, root-pulpers, are manufactured and cast out into the fields,
and machinery, machinery, machinery, still increases.
If I were a painter I should like to paint all this; I should like to
paint a great steam-ploughing engine and its vast wheels, with its sweep
of smoke, sometimes drifting low over the fallow, sometimes rising into
the air in regular shape, like the pine tree of Pliny over Pompeii's
volcano. A wonderful effect it has in the still air; sweet white violets
in a corner by the hedge still there in all their beauty. For I think
that the immense realism of the iron wheels makes the violet yet more
lovely; the more they try to drive out Nature with a fork the more she
returns, and the soul clings the stronger to the wild flowers.
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