The remarkable people of this world are useful in their way; but the common people, after all, represent the nation, the age, and the civilization.
—Henry Ward Beecher
The series consists of “the nation,” “the age,” “the civilization”; a group of three important things which the common people represent.
Here is a good example of a concluding series of phrases:
With such consecrated service, what could we not accomplish; what riches we should gather for her; what glory and prosperity we should render to the union; what blessings we should gather into the universal harvest of humanity.
—Henry W. Grady
A series constitutes sometimes a parenthesis; as,
For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness, by the red hand of murder, he was thus thrust from the full tide of this world’s interests, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death—and he did not quail.
—James. G. Blaine
This example opens with a commencing series which ends with “by the red hand of murder,” the sense of which is completed by “he was thrust from the full tide of this world’s interest into the visible presence of death,” but the thought is interrupted by the orator to interject the parenthetical clause “from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories,” and as what completes the sense, “the full tide of this world’s interest,” precedes the series, it is a concluding series.