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without being fully described. In the following, for instance, there is an allusion to the story of Jacob and the angel as related in the thirty-second chapter of Genesis:

Misery becomes as prosaic and familiar to me as my own health, but nevertheless I do not let go my idea, and will wrestle with the unknown angel, even should I halt upon my thigh.—Goethe. The following is an exquisite illustration: When I was a beggarly boy,

And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp.
When I could not sleep for cold,

I had fire enough in my brain;

And builded with roofs of gold

My beautiful castles in Spain.-Lowell.

Innuendo. Here the meaning is implied or insinuated, instead of being directly asserted. The figure is generally an obscure allusion to objects or facts that tend to depreciate the person or sentiment described:

All England, all America, joined in his applause. 'Hope elevated and joy brightened his crest.' I stood near him, and his face,' to use the expression of the Scripture of the first martyr, 'was as it had been the face of an angel.' I do not know how others feel, but if I had stood in that situation I never would have exchanged it for all that kings in their profusion could bestow.— Burke.

Apostrophe.-An apostrophe is a digressive address:

You all did love him once not without cause;
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.—Shakespeare.

'That very night in which my son was born,

My nurse, the only confidant I had,

Set out with him to reach her sister's house.
But nurse and infant have I never seen,

1 From the Greek, meaning a turning from. The speaker turns suddenly from the current of thought, and, instead of speaking of an object, addresses it or some other object.

L.

Nor heard of Anna since that fatal hour.

My murdered child! had thy fond mother feared
The loss of thee, she had loud fame defied,
Despised her father's rage, her father's grief,

And wandered with thee through the scorning world.' From the first example, it appears that apostrophe may, as it frequently does, involve personification; from the second, that it may represent the absent and dead as present and living.

Vision.-Vision is a representation of the past, future, or absent, as present:

I seem to myself to behold this city, the ornament of the earth and the capital of all nations, suddenly involved in one conflagration. I see before me the slaughtered heaps of citizens, lying unburied in the midst of their ruined country.-Cicero.

Notice, also, Byron's description of a storm in the Alps:
The sky is changed! and such a change! O night
And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! Far along
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder, not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers from her misty shroud

Back to the joyous Alps, which call to her aloud. The second example contains a variety of figures, and the pupil should be ever watchful for such intermixture in all examples. Thus, the first line, besides the vision and a figure yet to be defined (exclamation), begins an apostrophe. The second, third, and fourth lines contain not only apostrophe, but personification and simile. The sixth line contains vision and metaphor in one and the same word 'leaps.' Lines 6-7 contain, besides vision, the first and second degrees of personification in 'live,' 'tongue,' 'her,' and 'joyous'; and the third degree in 'call.'

1 From the Latin videre, to see.

Hyperbole.'- Hyperbole is the enlargement of an object beyond its natural and proper dimensions:

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.-Emerson.

So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell

Grew darker at their frown.—Milton.

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.-St. John. The object of this figure is to impress the mind strongly with the fact, by overstating the fact. 'Waves mountain-high' gives us a better idea of the effect of a storm at sea than the exact statement in feet and inches.

The language of the hyperbole may itself be literal (as in the examples given) or figurative. The true test is, not that the statement is literally untrue (which would be the case with all metaphors), but that the subject is magnified: as when a writer describes the carnage of a battle by 'rivers of blood and hills of slain,' where the italicized words are both metaphorical and hyperbolical.

Litotes.- Precisely the reverse of Hyperbole. A form by which, in seeming to lessen, we actually increase the force of an expression:

And he was not right fat, I undertake.-Chaucer.

To thee I call,

But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,

O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams.-Milton.

Antithesis.-Antithesis is the union of opposites, to

render unlike things more striking by contrast:

The wicked flee when no man pursueth || but the righteous are bold as a lion.-Bible.

Though sullied and dishonored || still divine;
An heir of glory || a frail child of dust;

1 From the Greek, meaning to throw beyond.

2 From the Greek, meaning to place against.

Helpless

immortal | insect infinite

A worm a God!-Young.

So in Tennyson's Brook

Men may come and men may go |

But I go on for ever.

The idea of perpetuity—motion eternally in one direction -is emphasized by its opposite, the coming and going.

The force of this figure is founded upon a deep principle of human nature, by which ideas and objects are more pleasing and impressive when placed beside their opposites as a white object appears whiter, and a black one blacker, if the white and black are placed side by side. Virtue appears fairer when contrasted with vice. A man at the base reveals best the vastness of an Egyptian pyramid. Darkness brings out the stars that were shining before unseen. The solemn stillness of the hour intensifies the report that 'startles the dull night.' The extremes of physical existence are best appreciated by placing the buoyancy of youth against the decrepitude of age; the season of bloom against the blight of frost. The flower were not so beautiful, did we not know that it must droop and wither:

The reed that waves along the river's brink,
Spearing its way into the summer air,

Is not so glorious as, when laid by winds,

It rests upon the mirror of the flood.-Alford.

Epigram. This signified originally an inscription on a monument. It came next to mean a short poem. It is now made to embrace any brief, startling expression of thought. There is in it an element of contradiction, causing a shock of surprise, and thus conducing to effectiveness:

'Conspicuous for its absence.'

"The child is father to the man.'

By indignities men come to dignities.-Bacon.

Language is the art of concealing thought.— Voltaire.

'Riches empty the soul and the pocket: poverty replenishes both.' Climax.'- Climax is the arrangement of ideas or thoughts in the ascending order of their importance. Thus in Cæsar's famous message to the Roman Senate — 'I came, I SAW, I CONQUERED.'

Thou didst blow with thy wind; THE SEA COVERED THEM: THEY SANK LIKE LEAD IN THE MIGHTY WATERS.-Bible.

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind.-Shakespeare.

The ascending order of thought in this passage is seen in the words 'towers,' 'palaces,' 'temples'-this last the abode of gods. These images are succeeded by the 'globe itself,' and this by one of more vital interest to us -'all which it inherit.' These shall dissolve,' and, to complete the climax, shall vanish as utterly as the baseless fabric of a dream.

This figure owes its effect to the peculiar constitution of the mind. We demand that the subject shall increase in interest till the last. The stimulus that may easily excite pleasure at first, soon palls; and we must have something stronger, else the result is weariness. The principle involved is wide-reaching, and of great practical value to the composer-it applies not only to the sentence but to the entire composition—the paragraph, the essay, the sermon, the lecture, the drama, the book.

Anticlimax.-Anticlimax is the arrangement of ideas or thoughts in the descending order of their importance: 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! what shall I do? I've lost my wife and seed-corn, too!'

1 From the Greek, meaning a ladder.

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