Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Blackmore

Blackmore makes speed feel like elegance, not violence. The mare does not thunder; she glides. By reaching for a swallow and a breeze instead of the usual cavalry metaphors (drums, hooves, conquest), he recasts motion as something almost ethical: power that refuses to bruise the world as it passes through it. “Smoothly and silently” is the giveaway. This is velocity with manners, a fantasy of control in an era that often fetishized force.

The sentence works because it keeps switching registers without losing the reins. “Fluent and graceful” borrows the language of speech and courtly bearing, suggesting the ride is a kind of persuasion, not mere transport. Then “ambient” expands the mare’s movement into atmosphere; the rider is not just traveling through nature but briefly becoming part of its texture. That’s the subtext of the astonishment: “I never had dreamed…” isn’t only wonder at a horse’s gait; it’s wonder at a world where motion can be both swift and gentle, where progress doesn’t announce itself with noise.

Context matters. Blackmore writes as a late-17th/early-18th-century poet when the culture is reorganizing itself around refinement, improvement, and measured taste. The similes enact that shift: nature is not wilderness to be dominated but a palette of delicacies to be matched. Even the final jolt - “swift as the summer lightening” (misspelled lightning, but the intent is clear) - preserves the paradox: the mare is a weather event that somehow leaves the flowers intact.