The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the mail-coach system
in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, but not however as
a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon
_alien_ evidence; as, for instance, because somebody _says_ that we have
gone fifty miles in the hour, or upon the evidence of a result, as that
actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart
from such an assertion, or such a result, I am little aware of the pace.
But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves
to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was--_Non magna
loquimur_, as upon railways, but _magna vivimus_. The vital experience of
the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our
speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this
speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy
to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his
dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was
incarnated in the _visible_ contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that,
radiating into _their_ natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man.
The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his
eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca
might be the first--but the intervening link that connected them, that
spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was
the heart of man--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then
propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more
or less dim, in his servant the horse.

But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have
disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor
Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle.
The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever: man's imperial nature no longer
sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the