8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. INTERJECTIONAL OR EXCLAMATORY STATEMENTS. O peace of mind! repairer of decay, Whose balms renew the limbs to labours of the day; Care shuns thy soft approach, and sullen flies away. Thou unassuming common place7 Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who secure within can say, DRYDEN. To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day. DRYDEN. Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime CAMPBELL. Beautiful objects10 of the wild bee's love! 71 14. TO THE RAINBOW. How glorious is thy girdle cast As fresh in yon horizon dark, A SUMMER EVENING. CAMPBELL. 15. How fine has the day been, how bright was the sun, 16. RAIN IN SUMMER. How beautiful is the rain! How beautiful is the rain! How it clatters along the roofs, Like the tramp of hoofs! How it gushes and struggles out DR. WATTS. From the throat of the overflowing spout! Across the window-pane It pours and pours; And swift and wide, With a muddy tide, Like a river down the gutter roars The rain, the welcome rain! LONGFELLOW. 1. The loch, or arm of the sea which the two runaways were crossing. 2. Of heaven. 3. These lines are uttered by Satan, after he has been cast down. 4. This is the last line of Satan's address to the fallen angels. 5. News. 6. Anxiety produces sleeplessness. 7. Spoken to the daisy. 8. Secure-used here in the old sense of free from care. 9. The stars and planets, which were believed to make celestial music. 10. Spoken to the flowers. (To p. 70 and 71.) CHAPTER XIV. COMPARATIVE STATEMENTS, OR SIMILES. THIS kind of statement might have been classed under the head of Level Affirmative. But the books on "elocution" all agree in stating that a simile ought to be read in a lower tone, and at a quicker pace, than the rest of the statement. This direction, if mechanically and unthinkingly obeyed, might produce bad reading. The right direction to be given here is, that the pupil should have a due sense of the proportion which the simile bears to the chief statement; and, as the simile can never be equal to the chief statement, that proportion must be fractional or inferior. (No. 9 is an exception to this general view.) Before reading these sentences aloud, it would be well to have the similes explained and questioned upon. 1. Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, 3. And thy heart as pure as they; One of God's holy messengers True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learnt to dance. 4. The illusion3 that great men and great events came oftener in early times than now, is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range of equi-distant columns, the farthest off look the closest; so the conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more remote they are. 5. descending, And the evening sun, One long track and trail of splendour, Down whose stream, as down a river, 6. I saw their chief tall as a rock of ice; his spear fir; his shield the rising moon; he sat on the shore of mist upon the hill. 7. the blasted like a cloud There was such silence through the host, as when 8. It is on the death-bed, on the couch of sorrow and of pain, that the thought of one purely virtuous action is like the shadow o a lofty rock in the desert-like the light footsteps of that little child who continued to dance before the throne of the unjust king, when his guards had fled, and his people had forsaken him—like the single thin stream of light which the unhappy captive has at last learned to love-like the soft sigh before the breeze that wafts the becalmed vessel and her famished crew to the haven where they would be. 9. 10. Sweet is the scene when virtue dies! So fades a summer cloud away, So sinks the gale when storms are o'er So dies a wave along the shore. A cloud lay cradled near the setting sun: WATTS. 11. 12. COMPARATIVE STATEMENTS, OR SIMILES. Emblem, methought, of the departed soul, JOHN WILSON. He spoke and Sohrab kindled at his taunts, Come rushing down together from the clouds, One from the east, one from the west; their shields MATTHEW ARNOLD. hath found as she rose As when some hunter in the spring more but stood MATTHEW ARNOLD.* 75 1. This verse is from Professor Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus. 2. That is, true power of expression. 3. The common, but deceptive belief. 4. This simile is from Ossian. (To pp. 73 and 74.) *These two similes-from the poem of Sohrab and Rustum-are among the finest similes in all literature. The simple and adequate expression is as fine and satisfactory as the truth of the conception. |