rvent
feelings by continual hurrahs. Every moment are shouted aloud by the
post-office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history
through a thousand years,--Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester,
Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth,
Glasgow--expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its
towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive
radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of
lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is
the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part of the entire
spectacle. Then come the horses into play,--horses! can these be horses
that (unless powerfully reined in) would bound off with the action and
gestures of leopards? What stir!--what sea-like ferment!--what a thundering
of wheels, what a trampling of horses!--what farewell cheers--what
redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation, connecting the name of the
particular mail--"Liverpool for ever!"--with the name of the particular
victory--"Badajoz for ever!" or "Salamanca for ever!" The half-slumbering
consciousness that, all night long and all the next day--perhaps for even
a longer period--many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of
gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning
joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory itself, by
multiplying to the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive
diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment
is destined to travel, almost without intermission, westwards for three
hundred[10] miles--northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our
Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundred fold by a sort of
visionary sympathy with the approaching sympathies, yet unborn, which we
are going to evoke.

Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and issuing into the broad
uncrowded avenues of the northern suburbs, we begin to enter upon our
natural pace of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the summer
evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, we are
seen from every story of every house. Heads of every age crowd to
the windows--young and old understand the language of our victorious
symbols--and rolling volleys of sympathizing cheers run along behind and
before our course. The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, forgets
his lamenes