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"Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis: at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum." We are imitating the man who made the experiment of constantly reducing the food on which his horse is to live. Let us take care that, just as he is learning to live on nothing, we do not find him dead in his stall. This, however, is no joking matter.
You are master of all those languages, which John Trott seldom speaks at all, and never well; consequently you need be a stranger nowhere. This is the way, and the only way, of having 'du monde', but if you have it not, and have still any coarse rusticity about you, may not one apply to you the 'rusticus expectat' of Horace?
Every one that looks towards infinity does, as I have said, at first glance make some very large idea of that which he applies it to, let it be space or duration; and possibly he wearies his thoughts, by multiplying in his mind that first large idea: but yet by that he comes no nearer to the having a positive clear idea of what remains to make up a positive infinite, than the country fellow had of the water which was yet to come, and pass the channel of the river where he stood: 'Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.
You are master of all those languages, which John Trott seldom speaks at all, and never well; consequently you need be a stranger nowhere. This is the way, and the only way, of having 'du monde', but if you have it not, and have still any coarse rusticity about you, may not one apply to you the 'rusticus expectat' of Horace?
He projected a great work on Christian philosophy, which was to have been his magnum opus, but he never wrote it. He projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I schemed it at twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! venturum expectat." What bade fair to be his best poem, Christabel, is a fragment.
See Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 30. 'They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden. Genesis, iii. 8. ... 'Vivendi recte qui prorogat horam, Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.
They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the rushing stream, thinking it must soon run itself out Expectat rusticus dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum. Vain is the dream that man will ever reach the point when he will think no more of the gods.
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