47. The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work,—to do every moment’s duty aright.—MacDonald.
48. The blessed work of helping the world forward happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.—George Eliot.
49. Various efforts were made to allay the panic among the native troops.—McCarthy.
50. For this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him the butt of much clumsy ridicule.—Macaulay.
51. Of course Mowgli, as a woodcutter’s child, inherited all sorts of instincts, and used to make little play-huts of fallen branches without thinking how he came to do it.—Kipling.
CHAPTER XXI
THE PARTICIPIAL PHRASE
The participle has been defined by grammarians as a verbal adjective. They do not mean that it limits or qualifies the meaning of a noun as an adjective does. Very few participles do that. They mean only that it is brought into the sentence for the purpose of telling something about some noun. It is not usually so close a modifier of the noun, either in relation or position, as many other noun adjuncts are; often it is so loosely joined to its noun as to seem almost like a parenthetical element. When the noun it modifies is the subject of the sentence, then the great importance of the participle as a sentence-element lies in the fact that it is a convenient means of avoiding a predication.
Participial Forms.—The participial forms of the transitive verb are six.
Active—Seeing, having seen.
Active progressive—Having been seeing.
Passive—Being seen, seen, having been seen.