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Travellers among savage tribes almost always remark the very figurative habit of speech common to primitive peoples. When Sir Walter Ralegh went to Guiana, for example, he had a long talk with an old chief about the history of the country. It was now in possession of a people foreign to the chief in question; and this is how the old Indian described the invasion. "When his father was very old," writes Ralegh, “ and himself a young man, there came down into the large valley of Guiana a nation from so far off as the sun slept (for such were his own words)." Again, uneducated people among ourselves have a way of using figures with a freedom and an aptitude that is sometimes surprising. I remember a Yankee villager, some years ago, who saw a small boy knocked down by the recoil of a new shot-gun. ""Tain't surprising," he said; "till a gun gets used to you, she's apt to be skittish." Quite how much of this spontaneous personification was a matter only of speech I never knew ; the man's mind was so simple in its habit that perhaps he really thought of the gun as a sentient creature, just as primitive jurists thought of the weapons they punished for committing murder. But his figure was a good one. Still again, those strange little ignorant savages that are growing up about us our own children have a way of using figures of speech that many poets might envy. I remember not long ago hearing a small voice outside a dining-room door, where a company was in the midst of dinner. Somebody went out to see what the matter was; and there

was a little man of six in his night-gown. "I waked up," he explained; "and by and by I felt as if everything was coming, and I'd better get away." I have rarely heard a more apt description of the effect produced by the mysteriously inaudible voices of the night.

You can see at once why children and untutored folks and savages - people in the condition of those who first made language at all-use figures of speech so freely and effectively. The things they really know are few; but what they know, they know pretty well. It is not often that they are called upon to recognize or to name any fact that is beyond the range of their daily experience. When they are so called upon, a double state of things arises: in the first place, the novelty of the idea they must name excites their interest, arrests their attention far more than would be the case with people who have new shades of thought a hundred times a day; in the second place, as the number of words at their disposal is relatively small, they are driven to describing this new idea in terms of comparison with something already familiar to them. And as the things already familiar to them are generally things that remain permanently familiar to everybody, their figures are figures that appeal to almost any human understanding they address.

With more highly civilized people the case is different. Among the imaginative productions lately submitted to me by pupils is a description of a night journey by rail. The traveller tells how he looked

out of the window, and saw the lights from the train flying across a snowy country, like a pack of wolves or a swarm of ghosts. Now, I never saw a swarm of ghosts, or even a pack of wolves; and unless I had frequently seen such scampering night-lights as he likened to these unusual phenomena, I should have had so slight a notion of what he meant that I should not have been much impressed by his description. Again, to cite a poem of local interest to any Bostonian, when the Rev. John Cotton, first minister of Boston, died, some verses were written to his memory by the Rev. Benjamin Woodbridge, whose name stands first in the catalogue of graduates of Harvard College. And here is how he described Mr. Cotton:

"A living, breathing Bible; tables where

Both covenants, at large, engraven were;

Gospel and law, in 's heart had each its column;
His head an index to the sacred volume;

His very name a titlepage; and next,
His life a commentary on the text.

O, what a monument of glorious worth,
When in a new edition he comes forth,
Without erratas, may we think he'll be
In leaves and covers of eternity!"

That is no bad specimen of the laborious rhetoric cultivated by the scholars who founded the college so dear to many of us; but nothing, continued for any length of time, could be much less effective, much less definitive of any connotation that would be aroused in an ordinary mind by contemplating the per

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:

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"This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon 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,

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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

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