117. O'erhead the countless stars Like eyes of love were beaming, All breathless lay a-dreaming. The fox-glove shoots out the green matted heather, She was idle and slept till the sunshiny weather, But children take longer to grow.-Jean Ingelow. 118. Thoughts which fix themselves deep in the heart as meteor stones in earth, dropped from some higher sphere. 119. When descends on the Atlantic The gigantic Storm-wind of the Equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges Laden with sea-weeds from the rocks. -Longfellow. Not so, his crime is a fouler one: God made the old man poor! For this he shares a felon's cell, The fittest earthly type of hell: For this, the boon for which he poured His young blood on the invader's sword, And counted life the fearful cost, His blood-gained liberty is lost. 121. They boast they come but to improve our state, enlarge our thoughts, and free us from the yoke of error. Yes, they will give enlightened freedom to our minds, who are themselves the slaves of passion, avarice, and pride. 122. Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head?— Shakspeare. 123. Flowers are stars, wherein wondrous truths are made manifest, 124. The twilight hours like birds flew by, As lightly and as free; Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand in the sea: For every wave with dimpled cheek That leaped upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there. 125. Humor runs through his speeches like violets in a harvest-field, giving sweet odor and beauty to his task when he stoops to put in the sickle. 126. Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. Shakspeare. 127. A blind man is a poor man, and blind a poor man is; for the former seeth no man, and the latter no man sees. 128. Reflected in the lake, I love To see the stars of evening glow, But earthly hope, how bright soe'er, Still fluctuates o'er this changing scene, As false and fleeting as 't is fair. Heber. 129. Night dropped her sable curtain down, and pinned it with a star. 130. The conscious water saw its Lord, and blushed. 131. The aspen heard them, and she trembled. 132. And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound. - Holmes. 133. Her hair drooped down her pallid cheeks, Like sea-weed on a clam. — Holmes. 134. We [alumni] leave, like those volcanic stones, our precious Alma Mater, But will keep dropping in again to see the dear old crater. 135. Prologues in metre are to other pros 136. Holmes. -Holmes. As worsted stockings are to engine-hose. Out of a tent already luminous With light that shines through its transparent walls. 137. The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant, 138. And tilts against the field, And down the listed sunbeam rides, resplendent Are footpaths for the thoughts of Italy. Longfellow. Longfellow's Ode to Dante. 139. And under low brows, black with night, Rayed out at times a dangerous light, The sharp heat-lightning of her face. Whittier. 140. It is nothing like the grave irony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly in earnest, the boomerang of argument, which one throws in the opposite direction of what he means to hit, and which seems to be flying away from the adversary, who will presently find himself knocked down by it. - Lowell. 141. And the cares that infest the day 142. He is a close observer, continually analyzing his own nature and that of others, letting fall his little drops of acid irony on all who come near him, to make them show what they are made of. - Lowell. 143. The day is done; and slowly from the scene The stooping sun upgathers his spent shafts, And puts them back into his golden quiver. — Longfellow. 144. The perpetual silt of some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their one impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic life and otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces Lowell. 145. The consecrated chapel on the crag, And the white hamlet gathered round its base, Like Mary sitting at her Saviour's feet, And looking up at his beloved face! - Longfellow. 146. Shakspeare did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of one hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next coming down souse into the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult its draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the hawk-nature as well as the hennature; and if he is unequalled in anything it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of reason, that looks down upon all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist. — Lowell. 147. There through the long, bright mornings we remained, Watching the noisy ferry-boat that plied Like a slow shuttle through the sunny warp Of threaded silver from a thousand brooks, That took new beauty as it wound away. - Holland. 148. If, as poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him [Shakspeare], its biting air did but trace itself in loveliest frost work of fancy on the many windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul. Lowell. 149. As from a deep, dead sea, by drastic lift Of pent volcanic fires, the dripping form Of a new island swells to meet the air, The life already wakened stretching forth To stronger light and purer atmosphere. - Holland. 150. When once the shrinking, dizzy spell was gone, I saw below me, like a jewelled cup, 151. The valley hollowed to its heaven-kissed lip- Poured from the golden chalice of the sun, Of those that held their heads above the crowd, And nothing perfect. - Tennyson. 152 We are puppets, Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her flower: Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand, at a game That pushes us off from the board, and others ever succeed? Tennyson. CHAPTER V. SPECIAL PROPERTIES OF STYLE. A Comparison. Rhetoric has sometimes been compared to architecture. In this comparison, words are the materials of which a structure is composed, sentences are the finished walls, and figures the ornaments. Each of these topics has now been made the subject of a chapter, under the several heads of Diction, Sentences, and Figures. The Comparison Continued. - The comparison may be carried one step farther. While the points thus far named belong to all buildings, buildings themselves are classified according to their several styles of architecture, and according to the uses for which they are intended. One is massive and stern, another light and graceful; one is Grecian, another Gothic; one is a temple for divine worship, or a hall for legislation, another is only a private mansion. Architecture, in other words, has its styles suited to its several occasions, though in every style all the points thus far noticed are necessary. Every building, that has a claim to be architectural at all, necessarily supposes materials, walls, and means of ornament. But beyond this, buildings rapidly diverge, and each has something peculiar to itself which others have not. How Applied to Rhetoric. -So it is in Rhetoric. Every kind of composition requires words, sentences, and figures. The discussion of these involves what may be called the general properties of style, that is, those which belong to every species of composition. But beyond this, works have special peculiarities. Some works are sublime, some are beautiful, some witty, some humorous. This gives rise to what may be called the special properties of style. |