developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams: an agency which they
accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time unprecedented--for
they first revealed the glory of motion; 2dly, through grand effects
for the eye between lamplight and the darkness upon solitary roads;
3dly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class
of horses selected for this mail service; 4thly, through the conscious
presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances
[Footnote: "Vast distances":--One case was familiar to mail-coach
travellers where two mails in opposite directions, north and south,
starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met
almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total
distance.]--of storms, of darkness, of danger--overruled all obstacles
into one steady co-operation to a national result. For my own feeling,
this post-office service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a
thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger
of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme _baton_ of
some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of
heart, brain, and lungs in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally,
that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed
myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-
coach system tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific beauty,
lay in the awful _political_ mission which at that time it fulfilled.
The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the land, like
the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar,
of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that,
in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which
they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the
grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound battles such as
these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with
the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more than