all meeting at the same moment with the Morgans, and Marions, and the one Washington from the distant South,--this army always seems to me to be the prefigured thunderbolt which the Cyclops forged for Jupiter.
'Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri.'
'Three from the sultry South, three from the storm-beat shore, Three parts from distant mountains' cloudy store, While raging heat fused all with three parts more!'"
You see, dear Tom, these audiences are always good-natured, and by no means critical of your version.
Why, at the only time I was ever at a regimental dinner on the Plains, long before the war, you know, when to the untaught mind it did seem as if there was no reason why we were there, and no pretence for mutual congratulation, I remember when poor Pendergrast called me up to represent science, (I was at that time in the telegraph business,) the dear old quotation came to my relief like an inspiration. I got round to the Flag. Do you remember how safe General Halleck always found it to allude to the Flag?
"The Flag, gentlemen,"--"colors,"--"rainbow of our liberties,"--"Liberty everywhere." "Blue, white, and red of Low Countries,"--"Red, white, and blue of France,"--"English Constitution,"--"Puritan fathers, Cavaliers," &c., &c.
"Does it seem too much to say, gentlemen, that, with the divine instinct of poetry, the unequalled bard of the court of Augustus, looking down the ages beyond the sickly purple of the palace, to the days when armies should be the armies of freemen, and not the Prætorian guards of a tyrant,--that he veiled the glad prophecy of the future in the words in which he describes even the thunderbolt itself? The white crest of the foam, the blue of the sky, the red of the fiery furnace, are all tossed together, and play together, and rejoice together, there in the smiles or in the rage of the very breeze of Heaven.
'Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ Addiderant, tres rutili ignis, tres alitis Austri.'
'Three parts of white the crested billows lent, Three parts of blue the heavens themselves had sent, Three parts of fiery red with these were blent, And on the free-born wind across the world they went.'"