Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 October 1879 — The Poetry of Iron. [ARTICLE]

The Poetry of Iron.

Burlington Hawkeye. There is a wonderful fascination about iron andiron-workers. Novelists have made them the scenes and heroes of tlieir stories; poets have made them the themes of deathless song. Wesiug of the forge of Tubal Cain, and Hector swore “by the forge that smithied Mars’ helm,” but the other trades are passed over. When did poet, in lofty numbers, sing the carpenter lathing a back room on the second floor? Who chants the brawny arms or the thrilling deeds of a man climbing a four-story ladder with a hod of mortar? Does anybody stand with rapt emotion watching a painterputty upa nail hole? I would not exchange my one hour at midnight in the iron works at Ashland for a whole week of watching a man mix mortar with a hoe. Why, these iron works surround the Asnlauders with enough romance to last a Western community at least six weeks. And yet l suppose there are people about here who never saw a nail made in their lives.

I have known times in my own eminently useful and highly ornamental career, times when I was trying to nail a front gate to a leather hinge, when I wished there had never been a nail made anywhere by anybody. And I watched as they fell from the ponderous machines fast as rain drops, and it seemed to me as I watched them fall, that 1 could hear the dull, treacherous thud of the hammer on the human thumb, the low wall of a woman’s anguish, “the big, big D” of a strong man in his agony. ’These strange, weird feelings and fancies rushed iuto my mind like a torrent I stooped and picked up a brand new nail, as a memento of my visit. Then I laid it down again. Sadly, but not slowly. I have an impresuoi., I know not where I got it, that a new laid nail, like a new laid egg, is warm. And that it is far more percepible in the case of the nail. It may not be so in every instance. I presume there may be some nails laid cold. But the one I picked up was not so everlastingly geewliizzing cold, and I did not investigate any further.