"
Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here
about twenty miles, from Caleb Harriman's tavern in Hampstead
toward Haverhill, when I reached the railroad in Plaistow, I
heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an Aeolian
harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of
the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and
applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was
so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the
country, its message sent not by men, but by gods. Perchance,
like the statue of Memnon, it resounds only in the morning, when
the first rays of the sun fall on it. It was like the first lyre
or shell heard on the sea-shore,--that vibrating cord high in the
air over the shores of earth. So have all things their higher
and their lower uses. I heard a fairer news than the journals
ever print. It told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the
electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton
and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of
things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.
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