To avoid difficulty, study carefully these examples:
The best thoughts and sayings of the Greeks; the moon caused fearful forebodings; in the beginning of his life; he spread his blessings over the land; the great Puritan awakening; our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; a wedding or a festival; the rude drawings of the book; masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning; the teachings of the High Spirit; those opinions and feelings; there is time for such reasonings; the well-being of her subjects; her longing for their favor; feelings which their original meaning will by no means justify; the main bearings of this matter.
12. Some abstract nouns were not derived from any other part of speech, but were framed directly for the expression of certain ideas or phenomena. Such are beauty, joy, hope, ease, energy; day, night, summer, winter; shadow, lightning, thunder, etc.
The adjectives or verbs corresponding to these are either themselves derived from the nouns or are totally different words; as glad—joy, hopeful—hope, etc.
Exercises.
1. From your reading bring up sentences containing ten common nouns, five proper, five abstract.
NOTE.—Remember that all sentences are to be selected from standard literature.
2. Under what class of nouns would you place (a) the names of diseases, as pneumonia, pleurisy, catarrh, typhus, diphtheria; (b) branches of knowledge, as physics, algebra, geology, mathematics?
3. Mention collective nouns that will embrace groups of each of the following individual nouns:—