When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of
one fellow's telling another that his argument was _absurd_; one
maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by
the phrase, "reductio ad absurdum"; the rest badgering him as a
conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for _Padus_,
the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times
when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants
thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum
ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
----Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
annexed, or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in _undress_ often affects
more than one in full costume.
"Is this the mighty ocean?--is this all?"
says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul
in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about
the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the
World's Mistress in her stone girdle--_alta maenia Romae_--rose before
me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one of
the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of
St.
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