It is for this that I now abstain from storming your city, to encircle it with an immovable blockade!' As the declaration of his great mission burst thus from the lips of the Gothic king, the spirit of his lofty ambition seemed to diffuse itself over his outward form.

His noble stature, his fine proportions, his commanding features, became invested with a simple, primeval grandeur.
Contrasted as he now was with the shrunken figure of the spirit-broken stranger, he looked almost sublime.
A succession of protracted shuddering ran through the Pagan's frame, but he neither wept nor spoke.

The unavailing defence of the Temple of Serapis, the defeated revolution at Alexandria, and the abortive intrigue with Vetranio, were now rising on his memory, to heighten the horror of his present and worst overthrow.

Every circumstance connected with his desperate passage through the rifted wall revived, fearfully vivid, on his mind.

He remembered all the emotions of his first night's labour in the darkness, all the miseries of his second night's torture under the fallen brickwork, all the woe, danger, and despondency that accompanied his subsequent toil--persevered in under the obstructions of a famine-weakened body and a helpless arm--until he passed, in delusive triumph, the last of the hindrances in the long-laboured breach.