Exercise 5
Mark all the verbs in the following quotations and note carefully their use.
- 1. Speak properly and in as few words as you can but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation but to be understood.—Penn.
- 2. "Freedom's battle, once begun,
- Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
- Though baffled oft, is ever won."
Note the use of may and can in this quotation:
- 3. Knowledge cannot be stolen from us. It cannot be bought or sold. We may be poor, and the sheriff may come and sell our furniture, or drive away our cow, or take our pet lamb and leave us homeless and penniless; but he cannot lay the law's hand upon the jewelry of our minds.—E. Burritt.
Note the use of shall and will and would and should in the following. Richard Grant White says: "I do not know in English literature another passage in which the distinction between shall and will and would and should is at once so elegantly, so variously, so precisely, and so compactly illustrated."
- 4. "How long I shall love him I can no more tell,
- Than, had I a fever, when I should be well.
- My passion shall kill me before I will show it,
- And yet I would give all the world he did know it;
- But oh how I sigh, when I think, should he woo me,
- I cannot refuse what I know would undo me."
- 5. I want it said of me by those who know me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.—Abraham Lincoln.
Exercise 6
Note the nouns as well as the verbs in the following quotation. Note also the use of infinitives and participles. Mark every verb and use it in a sentence of your own.