is very expressive of wealth and beauty. With this arrangement of words the piece becomes very striking and the choice of the strongest words is shown too in touch with the whole sentence. Whereas on the other hand if any other arrangement had been used much of the force of these words would have been lost. The thought of the extract is to describe the great wealth and beauty with which Satan is surrounded. The writer must have a very vivid imagination to describe such a scene of wealth and beauty. The first word, "High," appeals directly to the imagination and immediately gives the impression of power.
These answers were written by boys who had not been called upon to do anything of the sort before, and while their inadequacy is evident enough, they are genuine, and are sound as far as they go. Of course, after such a test, the first business of the teacher is to go over the selection and to show how he would himself have answered the question. The class is then ready to appreciate qualities which might be recited to them in vain before they have set their minds to the problem. In the examples I have given no one has touched, for instance, upon the suggestiveness of the words "Ormus" and "Ind," but very little is needed to make them see this after they have had the passage in an examination-paper.
A couple of examples dealing with the first two stanzas of Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib" may be given by way of showing how a different selection was treated.
The first thing I noticed in reading the extract was the perfect rhythm. You cannot read the extract without wanting to say it aloud. Then the choice of words struck me: "The sheen of their spears;" "when summer is green." It is hard for me to distinguish workmanship, thought, and imagination. I cannot tell whether the words and metaphors used in the extract were the result of deliberate choice and of long thought; but I strongly suspect that he saw the whole thing in his imagination, and the words just came to him. It is hard to understand how anything that reads so smoothly could have been written with labor. The strongest point of the extract seems to be its richness in illustration: "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold." No long, detailed description could explain better the wildness of such an attack, the sudden swoop of some half-barbaric horde, striking suddenly, and then disappearing into the night. "The sheen of the spears was like stars on the sea." The flash from a spear would be just such a gleam as the reflected star from the crest of a wave, visible for a moment and then gone.
Some of its excellent points of workmanship are melody and selection of words. The melody is excellent. It has a soothing effect when read aloud, and there is not a place where one would hesitate in regard to the accenting of words. I believe the melody is so good that a person only knowing the pronunciation of the first line could almost read the rest of it correctly because the sound of each line is so closely connected with that of all other lines. The selection of words is very good. There is not a place where a substitution could be made which would improve the meaning, sense, or melody. The extract shows great thought. In the last paragraph especially where the Assyrians are compared to
the leaves of summer and in autumn. No better thought could bring out more clearly how badly the host was defeated. In the first paragraph it also compares the Assyrians to a wolf coming down upon a fold. This again gives a definite idea, and seems to point out how confident they were of victory. The imagination is very vivid. You can almost think you were on the field and that all the events were taking place before you.
I have copied these partly to emphasize the point that it is idle to expect too much, and partly to illustrate the form in which genuine perception is likely to work out upon a school examination-paper. These have not been chosen as the best papers written, but each is good because each shows sincere opinion.
This sort of question is of course in the line of what is constantly done in class, but it is after all a different thing when it is made to emphasize the idea that an examination is a test of the power to appreciate literature instead of an exercise of memory.