ABSTRACT
Perhaps it is the pace at which we speed, suggestive in itself of abnormal energy and power, and comparative ubiquity, that makes things appear feasible when we travel by railway, though we considered them perfectly impossible before we took our tickets, and shall find them extremely difficult to accomplish when we have arrived. It has never been my good fortune to cleave the skies like Dædalus, or Mr. Glaisher, in a balloon; nor am I likely to do so, unless the “Deus qui vult perdere, prius dementat;” but I have no doubt that every man begins to feel a hero at an elevation of a thousand feet, and I fancy that for consciousness of capability, and a general conviction of superiority to his kind, as the horseman is to the pedestrian, so is the railway traveller to the horseman, and the aëronaut to the railway traveller, though the last fly through space at the rate of sixty miles an hour, on the wings of the Liverpool express.
