Christian Heroism
A mine spread out its vast machinery
Here engines, with their huts and smoky stacks,
Cranks, wheels, and rods, boilers and hissing steam,
Press’d up the water from the depths below.
Here fire-whims ran till almost out of breath,
And chains cried sharply, strain’d with fiery force,
Here blacksmith's hammer’d by the sooty forge,
And there a crusher crash’d the copper ore.
Here girls were cobbing under roofs of straw,
And there were giggers at the oaken hutch.
Here a man-engine glided up and down,
A blessing and a boon to mining men:
And near the spot where, many years before,
Turn’d round and round the rude old water-wheel,
A huge fire-stamp was working evermore,
And slimy boys were swarming at the trunks.
The noisy lander by the trap-door bawi’d
With pincers in his hand; and troops of maids
With heavy hammers brake the mineral stones,
The cart-man cried, and shook his broken whip;
And on the steps of the account-house stood
The active agent, with his eye on all.
Below were caverns grim with greedy gloom,
And levels drunk with darkness; chambers huge
Where Fear sat silent, and the mineral-sprite
For ever chanted his bewitching song;
Shafts deep and dreadful, looking darkest things
And seeming almost running down to doom;
Rock under foot, rock standing on each side;
Rock cold and gloomy, frowning overhead;
Before, behind, at every angle, rock.
Here blazed a vein of precious copper ore,
Where lean men labour’d with a zeal for fame,
With face and hands and vesture black as night,
And down their sides the perspiration ran
In steaming eddies, sickening to behold.
But they complain’d not, digging day and night,
And morn and eve, with lays upon their lips.
Here yawn’d a tin-cell like a cliff of crags,
And Danger lurk’d among the groaning rocks,
And oft times moan’d in darkness. All the air
Was black with sulphur, burning up the blood.
A nameless mystery seem’d to fill the void ,
And wings all pitchy flapp’d among the flints,
And eyes that saw not sparkled mid the spars.
Yet here men work’d, on stages hung on ropes,
With drills and hammers blasting the rude earth,
Which fell with such a crash that he who heard
Cried, ‘Jesus, save the miner!’ Here were ends
Cut through hard marble by the miners’ skill,
And winzes, slopes, and rises: pitches here,
Where work’d the heroic, princely tributer,
This month for nothing, next for fifty pounds.
Here lodes ran wide, and there so very small
That scarce a pick-point could be press’d between;
Here making walls as smooth as polish’d steel,
And there as craggy as a rended hill:
And out of sparry vugues the water oozed,
Staining the rock with mineral, so that oft
It led the labourer to a house of gems.
Across the mine a hollow cross-course ran
From north to south, an omen of much good;
And tin lay heap’d on stulls and level-plots;
And in each nook a tallow taper flared,
Where pale men wasted with exhaustion huge.
Here holes exploded, and there mallets rang,
And rocks fell crashing, lifting the stiff hair
From time-worn brows, and noisy buckets roar’d
In echoing shafts; and through this gulf of gloom
A hollow murmur rush’d for evermore.
