- Type: Art Audio File
- Collection: European Art
- Culture/Region: Europe
- Subject Area: Visual Arts
- Grade Level: 9-12, College, Adult
In the following excerpt from The English-Mail Coach, an 1849 essay, English writer Thomas De Quincey defends the old mail-coach system by describing the rush of riding as a passenger atop the carriage:
The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity,—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, 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. . .
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. . .
But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion. . .