He makes us see and hear with him the tens of
thousands of stone cutters and the ring of their tools squaring
the "setts"; and then one platoon after another stepping forward
and laying down its row of stones followed by rank after rank
of men with the paviours' rammers, which rise and fall at
the sweep of the band-master's rods, keeping time in a stately
music as they advance; the continuous falling and crashing
of the trees as other thousands of hands ply the axes along
the lines, that creep, slowly, but visibly, on through the
Forest that no foot had ever trodden--the thud of the multitudinous
machines driving the piles in the marshy spaces; the whole
innumerable sounds falling on the ear like the roaring of
a great and vast sea.
The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this
is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing
that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power
of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness, in
one day, of an iron way that shall last for all time.
We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen
hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch
some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind
it so ineffaceable a mark.
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