another, so that kind of oratory which is free from artifice can fight only with its own mere weight and force; but that kind which disguises and varies its attacks can assail the flank or rear of an enemy, can turn aside his weapons and deceive him, as it were, with a nod.” Lord Kames has said that in expressing any severe passion that wholly occupies the mind, metaphor is improper. He seems to have overlooked the fact that metaphor is the natural and spontaneous language of the all-absorbing passions. His lordship would have been nearer right if he had applied his rule to the proper use of allegories, or other long trains of implied resemblances. Dr. Carson is hardly less wrong when he affirms that, with few exceptions, grief, despair, or any of the dispiriting passions is seldom found to employ this figure. The book and lamentations of Jeremiah make short work with this theory. Some rhetoricians advise us never to make use of the same word to express metaphorically opposite ideas. Others, discussing the subject philosophically, claim to have discovered that all mankind make metaphors according to certain universal laws. Thus, Richter has observed that no nation calls error light, and truth darkness. But it should be remembered that, as Glassius has indicated, the many different qualities and attributes of the same object may be used to convey metaphorically many diverse ideas. Christ is called a lion, and so is Satan. Sleep expresses at once the hopeful repose of the blessed dead, and the false security of sinners. The sun denotes happiness and unhappiness. A shadow signifies protection; also great perils and adversities. A river denotes plenty of blessings; it likewise expresses terrors and over, whelming evils. The harvest is used in both a good and a bad sense.-HERVEY. HOW THEY PLAY THE PIANO IN NEW ORLEANS. "I was loafing around the streets last night," said Jim Nelson, one of the oldest loc>motive engineers running into New Orleans, “and as I had nothing to do I dropped into a concert, and heard a slick-looking Frenchman play a piano in a way that made me feel all over in spots. As soon as he sat down on the stool, I knew by the way he han dled himself that he understood the machine he was running. He tapped the keys away up one end, just as if they were ganges, and he wanted to see if he had water enough. Then he looked up, as if he wanted to know how much steam he was carrying, and the next moment he pulled open the throttle and sailed out on the main line as if he was half an hour late. "You could hear her thunder over culverts and bridges, and getting faster and faster, until the fellow rocked about in his seat like a cradle. Somehow I thought it was old 36' pulling a passenger rain and getting out of the way of a special.' The fellow worked the keys on the middle division like lightning, and then he flew along the north end of the line until the drivers went around like a buzz-saw, and I go. excited. About the time I was fixing to tell him to cut her off a little, he kicked the dampers under the machine wide open, pulled the throttle away back in the tender, and-Jerusalem jumpers! how he did run! I couldn't stand it any longer, and yelled to him that she was 'pounding on the left side, and if he wasn't careful he'd drop his ash-pan. "But he didn't hear. No one heard me. Everything was flying and whizzing. Telegraph poles on the side of the track looked like a row of corn-stalks, the trees appeared to be a mud-bank, and all the time the exhaust of the old machine sounded like the hum of a bumble-bee. I tried to yell out, but my tongue wouldn't move. He went around curves like a bullet, siipped an eccentric, blew out his soft plug, went down grades fifty feet to the mile, and not a confounded brake set. She went by the meeting point at a mile and a half a minute, and calling for more steam. My hair stood up like a cat's tall, because I knew the game was up. "Sure enough, dead ahead of us was the head-light of the special.' In a daze I heard the crash as they struck, and I saw cars shivered into atoms, pe ple mashed and mangled and bleeding and gasping for water. I heard another crash as the French proTessor struck the deep keys away down on the lower end of the southern division, and then I came to my senses. There he was at a dead stand-still, with the door of the fire-box of the machine open, wiping the perspiration off his face and bowing at the people before him. If I live to be a thousand years old I'll never forget the ride that Frenchman gave me on a piano."-Times-Democrat. TOPICAL ANALYSIS. Figurative Language, p. 601. a. Figures founded on resemblance, p. 602. b. Figures founded on relation, p. 602. c. Figures having an apparent inconsistency between the literal and figurative meaning, p. 602. d. Elliptical figures, p. 602. e. Pleonastic figures, p. 602. f. Figures of arrangement, p. 602. g. Personification, apostrophe, exclamation, interjection, p. 602. h. Grammatical figures, p. 602. i. Complex figures, p. 602. Chief Figures: a. Personification, p. 602. Apostrophe, p. 603. Exclamation, p. 603. b. Metonymy, p. 604. 1. Concrete and abstract, p. 604. 2. Effect and cause, p. 604. 3. Author and works, p. 604. c. Synecdoche, p. 604. d. Hyperbole, p. 604. e. Irony, p. 605. Epigram, p. 605. f. Simile, p. 605. 1. Unexpectedness, p. 606. 2. Adaptability, p. 607. Metaphor inconsistent, p. 607. g. Metaphor, p. 611. Metaphors condensed similes, p. 613. Mixed metaphors, p. 616. Force of simile and metaphor, p. 619. Allegory, p. 620. THE FABLE, p. 620. Distinguishing features: 1. Qualities of men attributed to brutes, p. 620. 3. Inculcates ethical principles and prudential max- Kinds of fables: a. Theoretic, p. 621. b. Moral, p. 621. c. Fables of destiny, p. 621. Danger in using figures, p. 621. CHAPTER XXXIII. RHYTHM. Though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion. For a good poet's made as well as born.-BEN JONSON. O many are the poets that are sown By nature, men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine; Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, Which, in the docile season of their youth, It was denied them to acquire, through lack Of culture, and the inspiring aid of books.-Wordsworth. Prose and Poetry Distinguished.-We have seen that one of the characteristics of poetry is Figurative. Language, and that this, though not essential to the essay and the oration, is frequent in all prose writing. We come now to Rhythm, another feature of poetry, and the one most readily recognized. This, though commonly regarded as essential to poetry, is not merely unessential, but positively weakening to prose. Hence those who have no ambition to be poets are still interested in Rhythm, which they must understand in order to be sure of avoiding it in prose. Rhythm is the recurrence of accent at regular measured intervals. Sounds that are produced by regular periodical vibrations are known as tones. Such are the sounds of the voice in singing. To this steady, prolonged, anticipated sound the ear becomes ac customed in singing, where tone is expected; but in discourse a break into musical tones would be startling, and, unless to attain some peculiar effect, intolerable. It requires of the ear a readjustment, which is disagreeable because it is unreasonable. So of rhythm. In poetry the ear adjusts itself to the regular recurrence of emphasis, and is shocked if the recurrence is interrupted. But in prose no such recurrence of emphasis is expected. When the ear first perceives it, it is incredulous; the attention is distracted from the meaning in the effort to listen closely and see if indeed what purports to be prose has been measured out into metrical feet; and if this proves to be true, the ear is disgusted at the lack of fitness. In going down stairs, the foot learns the intervals, and descends easily in absolute darkness, accepting regular intervals as characteristic of stairs; but in free walking one rebels against having his steps measured for him. Nothing more fatigues one than to stride from tie to tie on a railroad track. One form of favorite mechanism in construction is that in which a regular succession occurs, like the swing of a pendulum. In other instances in which one feels the sense of monotony, but cannot at once detect the cause, it is found, on a closer scrutiny, that the sentences have more than two variations, but they occur in one invariable order, with the sameness of a treadmill. Dr. Johnson's style sometimes falls into this monotone of mechanism. Hazlitt criticises it, saying that to read or to hear such passages from Johnson's writings is as bad as being at sea in a calm, in which one feels the everlasting monotony of the ground-swell. Charles Dickens sometimes falls under the tyranny of his ear in composing; and then his style assumes an arbitrary succession of a few constructions, in which thought is subordinated to euphony of expression. A roll and a swell and a return, in the boom of the style, if I may speak so incongruously, destroy the sense of everything but the sound. One is tempted to chant the passage. --PHELPS. Robert G. Ingersoll, in a recent interview, talked in this way of George Eliot. The statement appears as prose, but the merest typographical arrangement makes it passable blank verse, as wit ness: |