Men still sigh for the flesh pots of Egypt; still worship the golden calf.
There is no “Open Sesame” to the treasures of learning; they must be acquired by hard study.
Milton and Shakespeare are full of allusions to the classic literature of Greece and Rome.
Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement made for effect.
“He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.”
“And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart!”
Exercises in Figures. [264] Name the following figures. Of those that are based upon likeness, tell in what the similarity consists. In many of the selections more than one figure will be found.[55]
- “The long, hard winter of his youth had ended; the spring-time of his manhood was turning green like the woods.”
- A pig came up to a horse and said, “Your feet are crooked, and your hair is worth nothing.”
- “The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, but they were drawn swords.”
- “The lily maid of Astolat.”
- “O Truth! O Freedom! how are ye still born
- In the rude stable, in the manger nursed!”
- “The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees,
- Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
- And hints at her foregone gentilities
- With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves.”
- “O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port grandly, or sail with God the seas!”
- “Primroses smile and daisies cannot frown.”
- “How deeply and warmly and spotlessly Earth’s nakedness is clothed!—the ‘wool’ of the Psalmist nearly two feet deep. And as far as warmth and protection are concerned, there is a good deal of the virtue of wool in such a snow-fall. It is a veritable fleece, beneath which the shivering earth (‘the frozen hills ached with pain,’ says one of our young poets) is restored to warmth.”
- “We can win no laurels in a war for independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us by the side of Solon and Alfred and other founders of States. Our fathers have filled them.”
- [265] “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my judgment was as a robe and diadem.
- “I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.
- “I was father to the poor; and the cause which I knew not I searched out.
- “And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth.”
- “His head and his heart were so well combined that he could not avoid becoming a power in his community.”
Spenser, writing of honor, says:—
- “In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell,
- And will be found with peril and with pain;
- Nor can the man that moulds an idle cell
- Unto her happy mansion attain:
- Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain,
- And wakeful watches ever to abide;
- But easy is the way and passage plain
- To pleasure’s palace: it may soon be spied,
- And day and night her doors to all stand open wide.”
- “Over the vast green sea of the wilderness, the moon swung her silvery lamp.”
- “The peace of the golden sunshine was supreme. Even a tiny cloudlet anchored in the limitless sky would not sail to-day.”
- “A short way further along, I come across a boy gathering palm. He is a town boy, and has come all the way from Whitechapel thus early. He has already gathered a great bundle—worth five shillings to him, he says. This same palm will to-morrow be distributed over London, and those who buy sprigs of it by the Bank will know nothing of the blue-eyed boy who gathered it, and the murmuring river by which it grew. And the lad, once more lost in some squalid court, will be a sort of Sir John Mandeville to his companions—a Sir John Mandeville of the fields, with their water-rats, their birds’ eggs, and many other wonders. And one can imagine him saying, ‘And the sparrows there fly right [266] up into the sun, and sing like angels.’ But he won’t get his comrades to believe that.“
- “We wandered to the Pine Forest
- That skirts the Ocean’s foam;
- The lightest wind was in its nest,
- The tempest in its home.
- The whispering waves were half asleep,
- The clouds were gone to play,
- And on the bosom of the deep
- The smile of heaven lay;
- It seemed as if the hour were one
- Sent from beyond the skies
- Which scattered from above the sun
- The light of Paradise.
- “We paused amid the pines that stood
- The giants of the waste,
- Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
- As serpents interlaced,—
- And soothed by every azure breath
- That under heaven is blown,
- To harmonies and hues beneath,
- As tender as its own:
- Now all the tree-tops lay asleep
- Like green waves on the sea,
- As still as in the silent deep
- The ocean woods may be.”
- “When a bee brings pollen into the hive, he advances to the cell in which it is to be deposited and kicks it off as one might his overalls or rubber boots, making one foot help the other; then he walks off without ever looking behind him; another bee, one of the indoor hands, comes along and rams it down with his head and packs it in the cell as the dairy-maid packs butter into a firkin.”
- “For thy desires
- Are wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.”
- “What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! [267] how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!”
- “And in her cheeks the vermeil red did shew
- Like roses in a bed of lilies shed.”
- He betrayed his friend with a Judas kiss.
- “A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money and flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of table wit; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties let no such union be attempted. Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of a Dray-horse? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites from door to door?”
- “Hath a dog money? is it possible
- A cur can lend three thousand ducats?”
- “Kind hearts are more than coronets,
- And simple faith than Norman blood.”
- They sleep together,—the gray and the blue.
- “Have not the Indians been kindly and justly treated? Have not the temporal things—the vain baubles and filthy lucre of this world—which were apt to engage their worldly and selfish thoughts, been benevolently taken from them? And have they not, instead thereof, been taught to set their affections on things above?” (Quoted from Meiklejohn’s “The Art of Writing English.”)
- “Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.”
- “His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine,
- And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine,
- That mingle their softness and quiet in one
- With the shaggy unrest they float down upon.”
- Too much red tape caused a great amount of suffering in the beginning of the war.
- [268] “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
- Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.”
- “The old Mountain has thrown a stone at us for fear we should forget him. He sometimes nods his head, and threatens to come down.”
- “But pleasures are like poppies spread:
- You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed;
- Or like the snow falls in the river,
- A moment white—then melts for ever;
- Or like the borealis race,
- That flit ere you can point their place;
- Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
- Evanishing amid the storm.”