He goes on--so do you, sir--you both get on.
The "hollow-bedded rivers" grow, swell, visibly wax mighty and turbulent. You imagine that you stand on the bank and see the river that had shrunk into a thread getting broad enough to fill the capacity of its whole hollow bed. The rushing of arduous ether would not of itself have proved sufficient. Therefore glory to the Italian Ditches and glory to the Dumfriesshire Drains, which I have seen, in an hour, change the white murmuring Esk into a red rolling river, with as sweeping sway as ever attended the Arno on its way to inundate Florence.
Glory to the Ditches of the Vale of Arno--glory to the Drains of Dumfriesshire. Draw breath, sir. Now go on, sir.
"Cum sonitu." Not as Father Thames rises--_silently_--till the flow lapse over lateral meadow-grounds for a mile on either side. But "cum sonitu," with a voice--with a roar--a mischievous roar--a roar of--ten thousand Ditches.
And then the "flumina"--"cava" no more--will be as clear as mud.
You have hit it. They will be--for the Arno in flood is like liquid mud--by no means enamouring, perhaps not even sublime--but showing you that it comes off the fields and along the Ditches--that you see swillings of the "sata læta boumque labores."
For a moment--a single moment--leave out the Ditches, and say merely, "The rain falls over the fields--the rivers swell roaring." No picture at all. You must have the fall over the surface--the gathering in the narrower artificial--the delivery into the wider natural channels--the fight of spate and surge at river mouth--
The Ditches are indispensable in nature and in Virgil.
Put this glass of water to your lips, sir--not that I would recommend water to a man in a fit of eloquence--but I know you are abstinent--infatuated in your abjuration of wine. Go on--half-minute time.
I swear to defend--at the pen's point--against all Comers--this position--that the line
"Diluit: implentur fossæ, cava flumina crescunt Cum sonitu--"
is, where it stands--and looking before and after--a perfect line; and that to strike out "implentur fossæ" would be an outrage on it--just equal, Buller, to my knocking out, without hesitation, your brains--for your brains do not contribute more to the flow of our conversation--than do the Ditches to that other Spate.