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 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. All his arrangements for the day had been made on the previous night so perfectly, that the troops were already filing out from the Prætorian gate in orderly array, and taking their ground on the little plain at the mouth of the gorge, in the order of battle which had been determined by the chiefs beforehand. The space which he had selected whereon to receive the attack of Antonius’ army, was indeed admirably chosen. It front it was so narrow, that eight cohorts, drawn up in a line ten deep, according to the Roman usage, filled it completely; behind these, the twelve remaining cohorts, which completed the force of his two legions, were arrayed in reserve in denser and more solid order, the interval between the mountains on the left, and the craggy hill on the right, which protected his flanks, being much narrower as it ascended toward the gorge in which the rebel camp was pitched.