"Defy at first our nature's littleness, Till, growing with their growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate."
So with the Atlantic Telegraph. The mind is bewildered and baffled when it undertakes to contemplate either the consequences which are to flow from it, or the simple extent of the cable, and the mysterious regions which it traverses.
Far down along the groined and vaulted caverns of the Ocean's bed; along the slimy pathway, strewed with the wrecks of sunken argosies, their treasures darkling in oozy dungeons, and the forms of their once living, breathing, human freight, stark and ghastly in eternal sleep; along rayless and gloomy depths, where silence and solitude, profound and supreme, unending and eternal, encompass, pervade and encircle as with an atmosphere; along submarine alpine peaks, vainly struggling upwards towards the regions of light and warmth; beneath where the storm Fiend rides on the billow's crest, where the tempest howls the hoarse refrain of its anthem, and where sweeps the ice berg, congealed, perhaps, when the morning stars first sang together; stretches a metallic thread no bigger than your finger, uniting lands two thousand miles asunder in bonds of harmony and brotherly love; along which glides a subtle fluid, conveying thought and intelligence--those mysterious emanations of the human brain--and writes them in distant lands as rapidly as they are engendered. A thought is born, and instantly it is stamped upon a human mind two thousand miles away, across the pathless waste of ocean! A human heart beats, and its throb is felt before the blood returns for another circuit. A word is spoken, and it is re-uttered before the sound has died upon the ear of the first speaker! A question is asked, and its answer comes back as the shuttle returns with the woof! A boon is craved, and the heart leaps in exultation as it is granted, or sinks in despair as it is denied, almost as soon as the lips have closed upon its utterance! Stupendous achievement! Is there no limit to the conquests of man over the forces of nature, tangible or invisible? Shall he yet find means, by the clarity of his messengers and the invincibility of his power, to overtake and reclaim the lost and wandering Pleiad, and restore the fugitive to its celestial companions? Shall he go on, step by step, into the shadowy realms of the Impossible, until he shall claim affinity with Supreme Intelligence? Shall he advance, in the order of progressive creation, until he shall be developed in a being more nearly allied to Ultimate Destiny? Shall the curtains which conceal the arcana of hidden knowledge be gradually drawn aside, and his eye rest, with unflinching gaze, upon the secrets of the Infinite? Thoughts like these crowd upon the brain, stupefied and amazed by the announcement of an event, more wonderful, as a triumph over Nature's obstacles, than was ever proclaimed since the world began.