ILLUSTRATIVE AND PRACTICAL EXERCISES
The following extracts should be carefully studied. The diction, forms of sentences, and figures, as presented in the two preceding chapters, may be investigated along with the further elements of style just considered. Such questions as the following may be applied to the selections:
What kind of discourse is it? Is it descriptive? Is it objective or subjective? What points are described? Is it narrative? Is it expository? By what means is the elucidation made? Is it argumentative? What kind of proof is used? Is the thought the chief concern of the writer? Is the piece imaginative? Does it abound in adjectives? Does it present pictures? Is it stately and in full dress? What faculty predominates? Does it glow with feeling? Does it reach the point of sentimentalism? Does it show a love of nature? of humanity? Do the emotions count for more than the thought? Is it energetic or vehement? Has the writer positive convictions? Is he hesitating or dogmatic? Is it graceful or elegant? Does it exhibit eccentricity or sanity? Is it smooth, abrupt, laconic, epigrammatic, humorous, colloquial? Are there other characteristics?
Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm;
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands;
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf
In cluster; then a mouldered church; and higher
A long street climbs to one tall-towered mill;
And high in heaven behind it a gray down
With Danish barrows; and a hazel-wood,
By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes
Green in a cuplike hollow of the down.—Tennyson.
The Normans gave way. The English pressed forward. A cry went forth among the Norman troops that Duke William was killed. Duke William took off his helmet, in order that his face might be distinctly seen, and rode along the line before his men. This gave them courage. As they turned again to face the English, some of the Norman horse divided the pursuing body of the English from the rest, and thus all that foremost portion of the English army fell, fighting bravely.—Dickens.
Poetry of late has been termed a force, or mode of force, very much as if it were the heat, or light, or motion known to physics. And, in truth, ages before our era of scientific reductions, the energia—the vital energy—of the minstrel's song was undisputed. It seems to me, in spite of all we hear about materialism, that the sentiment imparting this energy—the poetic impulse, at least—has seldom been more forceful than at this moment.
Stedman.
How inexhaustibly the spirit grows!
One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content,—
So like a wall at the world's edge it stood,
With nought beyond to live for,—is that reached?—
Already are new undreamed energies
Outgrowing under, and extending farther
To a new object; there's another world!—Browning.
I have heard that nothing gives an author so great pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors. This pleasure I have seldom enjoyed; for though I have been, if I may say it without vanity, an eminent author (of almanacs) annually, now a full quarter of a century, my brother authors in the same way (for what reason I know not) have ever been very sparing in their applauses; and no other author has taken the least notice of me: so that, did not my writings produce me some solid pudding, the great deficiency of praise would have quite discouraged me.—Franklin.