3. To sit with your Livy before you, and hear the geese cackling that saved the Capitol: and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannae, and heaping them into bushels; and to be so intimately present at the actions you are reading of that when anybody knocks at the door it will take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your own study, or in the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal's weather-beaten face, and admiring the splendor of his single eye. 4. This is the only kind of study which is not tiresome; and almost the only kind which is not useless: this is the knowledge which gets into the system, and which a man carries about and uses like his limbs, without perceiving that it is extraneous, weighty, or inconvenient. SYDNEY SMITH. IVRY. I. Now glory to the Lord of Hosts, from whom all glories are! And glory to our sovereign liege, King Henry of Navarre! Now let there be the merry sound of music and of dance, Through the corn-fields green, and sunny vines, O pleasant land of France! And thou Rochelle, our own Rochelle, proud city of the waters, Again let rapture light the eyes of all thy murmuring daughters; As thou wert constant in our ills, be joyous in our joy; For cold and stiff and still are they who wrought thy walls annoy. Hurrah! hurrah! a single field hath turned the chance of war! Hurrah! hurrah! for Ivry, and Henry of Navarre! II. Oh! how our hearts were beating, when, at the dawn of day, We saw the army of the League drawn out in long array; With all its priest-led citizens, and all its rebel peers, And Appenzel's stout infantry, and Egmont's Flemish spears, There rode the brood of false Lorraine, the curses of our land; And dark Mayenne was in the midst, a truncheon in his hand; And, as we looked on them, we thought of Seine's empurpled flood, And good Coligni's hoary hair all dabbled with his blood; And we cried unto the living God, who rules the fate of war, To fight for his own holy name, and Henry of Navarre. III. The king is come to marshal us, in all his armor dressed; And he has bound a snow white plume upon his gallant crest. He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye, He looked upon the traitors, and his glance was stern and high. Right graciously he smiled on us, as rolled from wing to wing, Down all our line, a deafening shout, "God save our Lord the King!" "And if my standard bearer fall, as fall full well he may-- For never I saw promise yet of such a bloody fray-- Press where you see my white plume shine amidst the ranks of war, And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre." IV.