Representative Essays on the Theory of StyleWilliam Tenney Brewster Macmillan, 1905 - 354 pages |
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Æneid amongst Aristotle arrangement artist Athens attention audience beauty called century character Cicero colour composition condition Criticism Demosthenes diction distinction doctrine economy effect eloquence emotion English essay Euripides expression fact faculty feeling force French genius Grecian Greece Greek Greek Literature Hence Herodotus human idea illustration instance intellect interest Isocrates labour language Latin law of effect less Lewes literary literature logic Madame de Sévigné manner matter meaning ment mind mode modern nature never object orator organology original paragraph passage Pater Paterculus peculiar perfect Pericles Persia philosophy phrase Plato poetry poets practice present principle prose Quincey reader regarded rhetoric Roman sense sensible sentence simplicity sion Socrates Sophocles speak speech Spencer's Stevenson style succession suggested Tacitus tences term things thought Thucydides tion translation true truth utterance variety verse Voltaire whole words writer Xenophon
Popular passages
Page 13 - Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ; Raze out the written troubles of the brain ; And, with some sweet, oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart ? Doct.
Page 173 - Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
Page 302 - Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you...
Page 272 - Tis mine/ and this will witness outwardly, As strongly as the conscience does within, To the madding of her lord. On her left breast A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops I...
Page 171 - The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
Page 269 - I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.
Page 163 - On seeking for some clue to the law. underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them, the importance of economizing the reader's or hearer's attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point.
Page 183 - The superiority of the Metaphor to the Simile is ascribed by Dr. Whately to the fact that " all men are more gratified at catching the resemblance for themselves, than in having it pointed out to them.
Page 280 - Johnson's ; and doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the strictest sense original.
Page 25 - He writes passionately, because he feels keenly ; forcibly, because he conceives vividly, he sees too clearly to be vague ; he is too serious to be otiose ; he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich ; he embraces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore he is consistent ; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination swells up, it overflows in ornament ; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse.