Attila gazed upon her for several minutes in silence, and then exclaimed, "Thou art too lovely! But be comforted," he added, "thou mayst be happy yet!"
Thus saying, he turned, and left her to indulge her tears in peace.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
THE POWER OF MIND.
"On to Rome! on to Rome! On to the eternal city! On to the ancient capital of empires! On to the throne of mighty kings of old! Attila has conquered Ætius! The two mighty men have met; and the weaker has given way. Attila triumphs over Ætius! On to Rome! on to Rome! The world is open and prostrate before the sword of Attila. On to Rome! on to Rome! On to spoil, and to victory, and to triumph!"
Such were the cries that ran through the host of the Huns, as they marched on from Milan towards the devoted city of the Cæsars, And mighty and terrible indeed was that innumerable multitude, as, composed of a thousand nations, it flowed on like an overwhelming deluge upon its way. Those who stood and gazed upon its wide-extended front, as, rushing on irresistible, it swept the fair plains of Lombardy, might well want language and figures to express the awful advance of the barbarian world.
The dark thunder-cloud, sweeping at once over the clear blue sky, and shutting out sunshine and daylight beneath its ominous veil, is too slow in its course, too unsubstantial in its form, to afford an image of that living inundation. The avalanche that sweeps down the side of the Alps, overwhelming flocks, and herds, and cities in its way, is but petty when compared with the immense masses of that fierce and furious multitude. The long wave of the agitated sea, when cast by the breath of the tempest upon the echoing shore, would give but a faint idea of that rushing multitude of armed men.
No! Neither bounded to a narrow space, nor gradually and slowly carried forward, nor checked in its course and retiring to return again, did the multitudes of Attila advance. But, spread out from sea to sea--rushing onward with the swiftness of the wind--irresistible, overpowering, vast, like the dark tide of lava when it rushes down the channelled sides of Etna, came the barbarian myriads, finding brightness and beauty before them, and leaving darkness and desolation behind.
Through every road, over every field, into every city, across every river, they passed. Like the sword of the destroying angel in the dwellings of the Egyptians, nothing seemed to stop them, nothing to impede their progress, even for an hour. Terror and lamentation went through all the land; and the voice of weeping was heard from the banks of the Athesis to the Straits of Scylla; Ravenna, defensible as it was, was abandoned in a day; and Rome itself wailed in trembling for the approach of a new, a fiercer conqueror than Alaric.
At length the tent of Attila was pitched by the side of a grand lake, where from its bosom flows the stream by whose banks the sweetest of the Roman poets sung. No longer simple, as when he first entered Greece, appeared the camp of the barbarian king; no longer was seen the ring of wagons only, and the multitude sleeping in the fresh air of night; but there, tents of every form and every hue diversified the plain which stretches along, from the base of the gigantic mountains that enclose the stormy waves of the Benacus, to the soft green fields of the fair Mantuan land, where the "silver-gray cattle" of which Virgil sung still bathe in the placid waters of his native Mincius.