Discussion
	 Ruskin’s poem is based on lines on the steam engine by Erasmus Darwin in the “Economy of Vegetation,” part 1 of The Botanic Garden (1789-91). He may have been directed to Darwin’s poem by Conversation 40, “Of the Steam-Engine, and Papins Digester” by Jeremiah Joyce (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 2:232-33), which provides a summary of the poem. (Helen Gill Viljoen suggests that Ruskin’s source lay in Joyce’s summary itself, rather than in Darwin’s poem, to which he was directed by the summary [HGVP, box D.V]; however, Darwin’s original appears to have supplied diction and details that Ruskin could not have obtained indirectly through Joyce.) It is therefore appropriate that Ruskin positioned his poem at the head of the MS I poetry anthology, which immediately follows “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1,” for that text likewise draws verbatim on the Scientific Dialogues in order to supply Harry and Lucy with experiments.
	In fact, in chapters 8 and 9 of “Harry and Lucy,” Ruskin hurries Harry through a series of experiments in pneumatics drawn from Joyce, stopping just short of Conversation 40 on the steam engine. Thus, structurally and in terms of genre, the contents of this red book might be viewed as a lesson (in the sense coined by Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth), culminating in an ode to the industrial sublime (see “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1”: Discussion). In its rhetoric, this structure also appears related to Joyce’s tendency in the Scientific Dialogues to embellish his prose text with quotations from Darwin and other poets of the scientific revolution. (The remaining poems in Ruskin’s MS I poetry anthology form a miscellany unrelated to these themes, however.)
	The relevant portion of Darwin’s poem follows. In the original, Darwin’s lines are heavily annotated, notes too extensive to quote here (Darwin,Poetical Works, 1:30-35, 281-85). (Explain what Darwin is describing)

	The Giant-Power from earths remotest caves
Lifts with strong arm her dark reluctant waves;
Each cavernd rock, and hidden den explores,
Drags her dark coals, and digs her shining ores.
Next in close cells of ribbed oak confind,
Gale after gale, He crowds the struggling wind;
The imprisond storms through brazen nostrils roar,
Fan the white flame, and fuse the sparkling ore.
Here high in air the rising stream He pours
To clay-built cisterns, or to lead-lined towers;
Fresh through a thousand pipes the wave distils,
And thirsty cities drink the exuberant rills.
There the vast mill-stone with inebriate whirl
On trembling floors his forceful fingers twirl,
Whose flinty teeth the golden harvests grind,
Feast without blood! and nourish human-kind.
Now his hard hands on Monas rifted crest,
Bosomd in rock, her azure ores arrest;
With iron lips his rapid rollers seize
The lengthening bars, in thin expansion squeeze;
Descending screws with ponderous fly-wheels wound
The tawny plates, the new medallions round;
Hard dyes of steel the cupreous circles cramp,
And with quick fall his massy hammers stamp.
The Harp, the Lily, and the Lion join,
And George and Britain guard the sterling coin.
Soon shall thy arm, Unconquerd Steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the fields of air.
Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior-bands alarm the gaping crowd,
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud.

Ruskin’s poem adheres broadly to Darwin’s sequence of topics: the steam engine drains water from mines, raises up the ore, and works the bellows at the furnace to melt the ore; it pumps water into reservoirs, drives mills and threshes grain; and finally it powers a machine to mint coins. Ruskin animates his poem with a topic of his own, however—the storm in lines 2–3, which may be an inspired misunderstanding of Darwin’s steam-driven bellows. In his verse, Ruskin borrows Darwin’s heroic couplets without their pomposity, catching their livelier rhyme words, such as whirl and twirl.