son and the virtues of the Rev. John Cotton. Again, in "The Nation" I once found a most surprising review of Mr. Henry Adams's last volumes of American history. In this review there is as much laboriously ineffective metaphor as you often find crowded into an equal space. Take this sentence, for example, about President Madison: "In accepting the words as an immediate and prospective revocation of the decrees, and in promptly acting upon that understanding, he pierced himself through with many sorrows, and was betrayed into a diplomatic position which he felt to be most uncomfortable, and which was made doubly uncomfortable by the slings and arrows of the Federalists." After a few paragraphs of this sort of thing, you are not only left in the dark as to meaning, but if you have energy enough left — you are more than bored, you are exasperated, at what seems like deliberate perversity of diction. These few examples are typical of such use of figures among educated people as has led so many good teachers to advise pupils to use no figures at all. But in real literature there are plenty of figures that are very different from these, figures that you appreciate at once, figures that you remember, figures better yet than those of all the untutored makers of language. Take Dr. Holmes's saying about Boston which has passed into a proverb: -- "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.” Take what Sir William Temple, the most deliberate and formal of gentlemen, wrote about life: "When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." Take that famous lament of Cardinal Wolsey, in "Henry VIII.," which generations of school declamation have not spoiled: "This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost; And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a ripening-nips his root, And then he falls, as I do." Better still, take the writer whose figures have always seemed to me supreme: I mean Dante. They are so wonderful that you cannot translate away their power. In this lame English prose of mine, I believe much of their force still remains. I take, almost at random, two passages from the "Inferno" that I have never forgotten since the first day I read them. The first tells how Dante and Virgil, having emerged from a wood, find themselves on a great dike that skirts the edge of a sandy plain. "Already," he goes on, "we were so far from the wood that I could not have seen where it was, even though I had turned about, when we met a troop of spirits, that came close to the dike. And each of them peered at us, as of an evening one peers at another beneath the new moon, and they knit their brows at us, as an old tailor does at the eye of a needle." I have yet to find a passage in literature that in so few words gives a more marvellously suggestive notion of what that dim and ghostly twilight is like, when one cannot tell quite what one sees, when every mystery is doubly mysterious, and the crescent moon hangs low in the west. The second passage from Dante is that more famous one which occurs early in the story of Francesca: it is the figure that Mr. James Lowell, with pardonable enthusiasm, somewhere calls perhaps the most perfect in all literature. Dante and Virgil are standing on the edge of a cliff; and through the dark air before them the blasts of hell are sweeping the spirits of those who are damned for their lusts. And Dante would speak with two whom he sees clinging together," the two that seem so light in the wind." So he calls to them. And even as doves, called by longing, with open, unmoving wings fly to the sweet nest, borne through the air by will, so these issued from the swarm." I might go on endlessly, from Dante, from Shakspere, and from thousands of the lesser masters, showing figures such as every lover of letters must. be glad to have. If teachers could teach the secret of such as these, their task were another thing than the dreary one they find it. 66 The examples we have before us already, however, are enough for our purpose. If, as I believe, they are truly typical, they will warrant us in drawing certain conclusions as to what makes figures effective, and what fails to. And if the essence of tropes be, as I have suggested, the same thing, a little exaggerated, that underlies all force, namely, a deep sense of connotation,—these conclusions will help us toward some knowledge of how, with force in view, we may choose and compose the elements of style. The effective figures, we find, are used by two perfectly distinct classes of men: first, untutored savages, peasants, children, - people whose knowledge of life and command of language is as elementary as possible; secondly, people who may be broadly classed as masters of the art of literature, -people whose knowledge of life and command of language becomes, as we consider the best of them, as comprehensive and exhaustive as human power will permit. The ineffective figures, we find, are used by the far more numerous class of writers and speakers which comes between these two, those who have awakened from elementary unconsciousness of the limits of their perception and expression, and who have not yet attained the serene certainty of mastery. In this class most of us inevi tably find ourselves. We are born into conditions that preclude the possibility of pristine unconsciousness; and unless we are lucky enough to be born men of genius, we can attain anything resembling mastery only by years of patient work. The question before us, then, is how we should proceed in our effort to attain it. To answer this, we may best examine a little more critically the examples already before us, to discover if we can what traits the effective figures possess, and what the ineffective. We have already seen some of the traits of the elementary figures, -those used by savages and peasants and children. Whoever has lived long enough to be conscious of Nature is familiar with sunset, and the long stretch of sleepy night that follows to any human being the phrase "they came from as far off as the sun slept," must instantly convey, in perfectly familiar terms, a familiar notion of extreme remoteness. Whoever has seen a restless horse knows what a Yankee means by skittish, and instantly feels the likeness between this trait in animals and the behavior of a gun in the hands of an inexperienced sportsman. Whoever has the most elementary experience of human emotion knows the disturbing sense of the mysteries about us which sometimes comes to us as we lie awake, and which can be likened to the approach of nothing more definite than that vaguest of things, everything. So when the old king of Guiana said that his enemies came from "as far off as the sun slept; " and when the Yankee countryman said that a new gun is "apt to be skittish;" and when the frightened child said he had hurried out of bed because he "felt as if everything was coming,"-each of these elementary beings used a figure so familiar in substance that anybody can instantly understand it. In each of these cases, too, the analogy between the figure and the thing it |