Note the ascending force of this extract from Hamlet. The drawing of the picture, delineating the brow, hair, eyes, etc., the description of the bearing, and the final summing up,
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
It would seem to be impossible for mortal man to make a picture more vivid than is the one here presented in words by the magic art of Shakespeare.
the use of word-pictures
What benefit is to be derived from the use of word-pictures?
An illustration, or picture, is quickly comprehended, and will abide with the hearer when plain facts and colorless words are forgotten. Christ did the most of His teaching by means of similitudes: “The sower and the seed,” “The laborers in the vineyard,” “The ten virgins,” are but instances of His employment of this means of conveying an insight into difficult problems. In fact, in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, xiii:34, it is stated:
All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables: and without a parable spoke he not unto them.
Henry Ward Beecher, in his sermon, “Poverty and the Gospel,” used this figure of speech:
On the Niagara River logs come floating down and strike an island, and there they lodge and accumulate for a little while, and won’t go over. But the rains come, the snow melts, the river rises, and the logs are lifted up and down, and they go swinging over the falls. There is a certain river of political life, and everything has to go into it first or last; and if, in the days to come, a man separates himself from his fellows without sympathy, if his wealth and power make poverty feel itself more poor and men’s misery more miserable, and set against him the whole stream of popular feeling, that man is in danger.
From what source is the speaker to take his illustrations?