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, though we are far
from feeling it as a personal experience; 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
myself 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 not _magna loquimur_, as upon railways,
but _vivimus_. Yes, "magna _vivimus_"; we do not make verbal
ostentation of our grandeurs, we realise our grandeurs in act, and in
the very experience of life. 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 the noblest
amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-
beating hoofs. 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 links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of
battle into the eyeballs of the horse, were the heart of man and its
electric thrillings--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and
then propagating its own tumults by contagious shouts and gestures to
the heart of 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 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 inter-agencies are gone in the