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To us it was a change, a relief inexpressibly delightful, to emerge from the Stygian regions of the copper-works, where for the last five or six days we had wandered like an 'unshriven spirit, and to find ourselves in contemplation of the happy faces of the scholars, and to hear the hopeful, encouraging tones of their intelligent teachers.
From its geographical position and excellent harbour, Swansea was at once selected as the best port on the Welsh coast in which to establish the copper-works; and accordingly, the Swansea valley was soon planted with chimneys, furnaces, roasters, refiners, and, in short, all the necessary and costly enginery which belongs to the vast and intricate processes of smelting copper.
I saw the copper-works also, and acknowledged the Lord in the gifts and the faculties He hath given to the children of men. 27. I did see the Lord Mayor, his solemnities, and desired to be instructed by what I saw. The variety of the Lord's creatures on other parts of the earth was represented. In this I did acknowledge Him.
Our first glimpse of the copper-works was obtained in the 'gloaming' of a lovely night in August last year, as we rattled over the Landore viaduct of the South Wales Railway.
The noxious gases which we see and feel around us evolved in the reduction of copper, have not played so long on the surrounding atmosphere without doing their work. Everywhere within their influence, the perennial vegetation is meagre and stinted. The hills, particularly to the southeast of the copper-works, are barren in the extreme.
Part of it is occasionally cast into iron moulds, shaped like old Gothic arches, only uglier; and the casts are applied in great quantity as coping-stones to the walls and fences in the regions of the copper-works. Although not a very tasteful, it is yet a very useful, and, at the same time, a very characteristic application.
While I was viewing this performance, I remarked a smell like that of singed horn or leather, though his hand was not burnt. The workmen at the Swedish melting-house showed the same thing to some travellers in the seventeenth century; for Regnard saw it in 1681, at the copper-works in Lapland.
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