“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About three hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest looked out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds arising; and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast laboratory of hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful “Sounds that live in darkness” (Wordsworth’s _Excursion_), never had I consciously witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of a solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections, and the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even horror.... “The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height, brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting me, afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself unavoidably upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller side-rooms—meant probably for cards or for refreshments. This single feature of the rooms——their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness which had become the exponent of that altitude—this one terrific feature (for terrific it was in its effect), together with the crowding and evanescent images of the flying feet that so often had spread gladness through these halls on the wings of youth and hope at seasons when every room rang with music—all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the dead hours of the night were stealing along, all around me—household and town—sleeping, and whilst against the windows more and more the storm was raving, and to all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the deadliest condition of nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high over which predominated horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself. “... Such thoughts, and visions without number corresponding to them, were moving across the _camera obscura_ of my fermenting fancy, when suddenly I heard a sound of wheels, which, however, soon died off into some remote quarter. I guessed at the truth, viz., that it was the Holyhead Mail,[3] wheeling off on its primary duty of delivering its bags at the post-office. In a few minutes it was announced as having changed horses; and I was off to London.” Footnote 3: _Not_ the Holyhead Mail. De Quincey is writing of 1802, when the Holyhead Mail, as already shown, went through Chester. He refers to the London, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, which, started in 1785, lasted until 1808. It was by this he travelled. XXV