If we have failed, as we have, to
convey a true impression of the serious labour and anxieties which
crowded its hours, we will quote the summary of a writer who described it
at the time, and knew what he was describing: "It was like shaking the
alphabet in a bag, and bringing out the letters into words and sentences;
such was the sense of absolute confusion turned into intelligent shape."
{19}
CHAPTER IV.
_Gesta ducis celebro_, _Rutulis qui primus ab oris_
_Cambriae_, _odoratu profugus_, _Borthonia venit_
_Litora_; _multum ille et sanis vexatus et aegris_,
_Vi Superum_, _quibus haud curae gravis aura mephitis_:
_Multa quoque et loculo passus_, _dum conderet urbem_
_Inferretque deos Cymris_.
AN EPIC FRAGMENT.
[Greek text].
The careful general who has completed his disposition without one
discoverable flaw, who has foreseen all emergencies, and anticipated
every possible combination, may await the action with a certain moral
confidence of success. But he would be a man of no human fibre, were he
not to feel some disquiet in his inmost soul when he gets upon horseback
with his enemy in sight, and listens for the boom of the first gun.
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