Shakespeare.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of Thought's interior sphere
Those wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.—Emerson.
Note
In addition to the extracts here given, the student might examine those connected with previous chapters, and discover the various figures they contain. Furthermore, it is recommended that he study the figures in a whole piece; as Milton's "L'Allegro" or "Il Penseroso," Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," Gray's "Elegy," Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night," Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," Moore's "Paradise and the Peri," Shelley's "Adonais," Tennyson's "Passing of Arthur," Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal," and many others that will occur to the teacher. Let him determine the percentage of figurative sentences, and compare the results with those obtained from an examination of the prose of Macaulay, Ruskin, Carlyle, De Quincey, Lowell, and other standard writers. This comparison will throw light on the essential difference between poetry and prose.
