Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath,
Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.
Macbeth.
The first faint streaks of day were scarcely visible in the east, when Catiline, glad to escape the horrors which he had endured through the dark solitude of the night watches, issued from his tent, armed at all points, and every inch a captain.
All irresolution, all doubt, all nervousness had passed away. Energy and the strong excitement of the moment had overpowered conscience; and looking on his high, haughty port, his cold hard eye, his resolute impassive face, one would have said that man, at least, never trembled at realities, far less at shadows.
But who shall say in truth, which are the shadows of this world, which the realities? Many a one, it may be, will find to his sorrow, when the great day shall come, that the hard, selfish, narrow fact, the reality after which his whole life was a chase, a struggle, is but the shadow of a shade; the unsubstantial good, the scholar's or the poet's dream, which he scorned as an empty nothing, is an immortal truth, an everlasting and immutable reality.
Catiline shook at shadows, whom not the 'substance of ten thousand soldiers armed in proof,' could move, unless it were to emulation and defiance.
Which were in truth more real, more substantial causes[pg 217] of dismay, those shadows which appalled him, or those realities which he despised.
Ere that sun set, upon whose rising he gazed with an eye so calm and steadfast, that question, to him at least, was solved for ever—to us it is, perhaps, still a question.
But, at that moment, he thought nothing of the past, nothing of the future. The present claimed his whole undivided mind, and to the present he surrendered it, abstracted from all speculations, clear and unclouded, and pervading as an eagle's vision.