But I never was anything of a scholar.

It is odd therefore, that the one apposite passage which recurred to me in its entirety was in hexameters and pentameters: Me miserum, quanti montes volvuntur aquarum! Jam jam tacturos sidera summa putes.
Quantae diducto subsidunt aequore valles! Jam jam tacturas Tartara nigra putes.
Quocunque adspicio, nihil est nisi pontus et aether; Fluctibus hic tumidis, nubibus ille minax....
More there was of it in my head; but this much was an accurate statement of my case; and yet less so now (I was thankful to reflect) than in the morning, when every wave was indeed a mountain, and its trough a Tartarus.

I had learnt the lines at school; nay, they had formed my very earliest piece of Latin repetition.

And how sharply I saw the room I said them in, the man I said them to, ever since my friend! I figured him even now hearing Ovid rep., the same passage in the same room.

And I lay saying it on a hen-coop in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! At last I fell into a deep sleep, a long unconscious holiday of the soul, undefiled by any dream.
They say that our dreaming is done as we slowly wake; then was I out of the way of it that night, for a sudden violent rocking awoke me in one horrid instant.