skillful advocate will often bring up related matters which should engage the feelings, and suggest things that give the discussion a more personal color and meaning. When to the intellectual interest of a wellordered treatment such emotional interest is added, the compelling power of the composition is greatly increased.

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Crit

EXERCISES.

1. Read the selection from Harriet Prescott Spofford, page 241, and say whether the second sentence tells or suggests something. Do you get anything more than fact from "and see it draw a film across the stars"? If so, what? Are the further details of the description interesting simply in themselves, or because they are suggestive of elemental forces that transcend human experience? Is it the dream or the reality that makes the region such as to appeal to the fancy of poets and singers? Is this then, an example of the literature of full statement, or of the literature of suggestion?

2. To which of the divisions of literature considered in this chapter do the selections from the following authors belong? Jordan, page 211; Bushnell, 212; Parkman, 72; Fernald, 144; Choate, 74; Norton, 76; Cornford, 126; Ruskin, 123; Spalding, 229. V

3. Bring to class a paragraph or more of exposition or argumentation, which through the color and life of its diction or through some other quality, seems to you to be in a degree suggestive of more than is directly stated.

4. In the following lines from Browning's "Prospice " what do you understand by "the fog,' "the mist,' "the snows,' "the place," "the power of the night," Arch Fear"? Write out a connected statement of your understanding of the lines.

"the

Fear death?

to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:

For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.

5. Are the following poems characterized by full state-
ment or by suggestion? "The Splendor Falls," from Part
IV. of Tennyson's "Princess." (See note in edition in
Cambridge Literature Series.) Wordsworth's "Stepping
Westward," Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Au
Homer," Dryden's "Alexander's Feast.

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6. Should a writing give pleasure or not, if it is to be ranked as literature? How does literature give pleasure?

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CHAPTER XIX.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE.

132. The Use of Figures. Figurative language is the employment of words or phrases in other than their exact meanings, as in speaking of a ship as a sail, or in applying such an adjective as rough to something not having material substance, a rough voyage. In a figure of speech, or trope, a word is turned from its literal sense for other use of a like kind. When we speak of a heavy heart we are using the word heavy in a figurative sense. So when we speak of depressing thoughts the word depressing is used out of its literal signification. In our thought we associate unpleasant things with the sense of physical depression; and so when the words heavy and depressing are applied to other than material things we take out of the full meaning of the words only what we may call the type meaning of unpleasantness, a figurative use of the words, since at first heaviness and depression must have referred to material substance and weight. Such words have by long use come to have the figurative meaning so bound up with the literal that we can hardly separate them, but often the distinction is readily made.

In the first verse of the twenty-third psalm we have

what we may take as a typically good figure, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." The shepherd is perhaps the best possible type of loving watchfulness and care, and the mind at once picks out this quality as the one which is here to be understood. It is a characteristic so striking in the shepherd as almost to exclude other characteristics, thus intensifying our understanding of it in the metaphor. Dignity and loftiness of character in a man may be made more real by likening him to a cedar of Lebanon; and the mind, feeling at once the majesty of the cedar, would not accept any other comparison, although the man and the cedar might have some other quality in like degree. If anything has come to be the type of some particular quality or character, as the violet of modesty, it can be used effectively in the simile or metaphor 'only for the purpose of making us see in something else the quality or character which it types. But we do not think of everything as a type of some specific quality or character, and things of which we do not so think may serve through their use in simile and metaphor to intensify any one of a number of qualities.

It is to be remembered always that figures should be employed only for the purpose of making the meaning clearer or more vivid and suggestive. We have seen that concrete and particular terms are more emotionally appealing than abstract and general terms, and figures are often used to present the general and abstract under the form of something concrete and particular. Figures

that serve merely to adorn or embellish a composition are out of place, and those which give the reader surprise in discovering a hitherto unknown likeness between two objects are of questionable literary value.

4133. Simile and Metaphor. - Although figurative language takes many forms in literature, we need consider only the few that are most frequently used. Simile and metaphor are the two most common figures of speech. They are figures of comparison; that is, they point out a resemblance between two things differing in kind, the value of the figure depending on the degree of resemblance or on the degree of subtle suggestion involved. When the resemblance is expressed in full by means of like, as, or some such word, the figure is a simile. For example, we say, "His hair is as yellow as gold," or, "Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax." When the resemblance is implied, the figure is a metaphor. The simile and the metaphor are, therefore, essentially alike, the metaphor implying what the simile definitely expresses. Any simile may be contracted. into a metaphor, and any metaphor may be expanded into a simile. In the metaphor one thing is spoken of under the name of another, and if the figure be extended into a story it becomes a fable or an allegory. Examples of metaphor are the following:

Wit is a dangerous weapon.

Aloft on sky and mountain wall
Are God's great pictures hung.