speak, for example, of shop hands, meaning men who work in shops. Another variety is employed when sailors are called tars, or salts, tar and salt being associated with the seaman's life. Many a metonymy is so common that it goes all unnoticed. We speak of reading Dickens, though it is his books that we read, not the man. We engage board without stopping to think that board, through metonymy, means table, and that it is not the table but the food that is bargained for. It is a useful figure in that it often focuses attention on some one detail of a picture, intensifying the impression. To say that the general advanced with a force of bayonets conveys a more vivid picture than to say that he advanced with a force of soldiers. It is perhaps more picturesque, certainly a shade less severe, to say of a man that he is too fond of the bottle than it is to say that he is too fond of intoxicating liquor. Moreover metonymy, like metaphor, is a great time-saver, often making one word do the work of ten.

Closely related to metaphor and metonymy is what is called the transferred epithet. This is illustrated in the line

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings.

Jealous, grammatically considered, modifies wings, yet logically it belongs to Darkness. But Darkness shows jealousy through spreading his wings; hence the transfer. The poet speaks of the cannon's deadly roar, though the roar is not deadly at all. But since the cannon becomes deadly when it roars, the epithet is transferred from cannon to roar.

Hyperbole is the rhetorical name for exaggeration, when employed not for the purpose of deceiving but to make a

statement impressive. declares the poet, not with the thought that his words will be taken literally, but for the purpose of stirring the imagination, which otherwise may picture waves altogether too tame. It is a noble figure when nobly employed; a tiresome, degrading one as used extravagantly by many young people and not a few of their elders, who continue to live though "tired to death," and declare that things quite ordinary are "just heavenly." There is a wide difference between the language of real, intense emotion and language that is mere gush.

The waves ran "mountain high,"

Irony is quite as common as hyperbole. It is the name applied to words which state the opposite of what the speaker or writer intends shall be understood. When Antony is addressing the Roman rabble, he refers many times to Brutus and the other conspirators as "honorable" men. At first he seems to use the word sincerely, but as he slowly gains the confidence of his hearers, it becomes apparent that he would have them believe the conspirators quite the reverse of honorable. Like hyperbole, irony is used much too freely, thoughtlessly, in daily speech, especially the contemptuous, scornful, taunting, or sneering variety known as sarcasm, which cuts and stings. In short, it is a strong weapon, effective if properly employed, yet out of place save when the speaker is moved by righteous indignation or justifiable scorn.

An Apostrophe is a figure of speech in which inanimate objects are addressed as if they were human beings, or persons absent are addressed as if they were present. A stanza in Byron's Childe Harold begins

Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.

In his Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte occur the lines

Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind

Who bow'd so low the knee?

But Napoleon is not present; the words, therefore, are an apostrophe.

Antithesis or Contrast is a figure of speech in which things are brought into prominence by being placed in opposition. It is found in single sentences, as in the familiar To err is human; to forgive, divine.

But it may extend through several sentences, an entire paragraph, or even through many paragraphs.

An Epigram is well defined by the Standard Dictionary as "a pithy or antithetical observation, as in "The child is father of the man"." Professor Bain describes it as "an apparent contradiction in language, which by causing a temporary shock, rouses our attention to some important meaning underneath." It usually takes the form of a single brief sentence.

Climax is an arrangement by which the interest increases step by step, the more important or the more interesting following the less important or less interesting, till an impressive close is reached.

Interrogation is a figure in which an opinion is expressed, more forcefully than would be possible by direct statement, in the form of a question which expects no answer.

Exclamation is a figure in which sudden, deep emotion is expressed in the form of an exclamatory sentence or phrase.

NOTE.-For exercises to accompany this section see page 218.

C

VERSIFICATION

A line of poetry is called, technically, a verse. There are as many verses in any poem as there are lines. We speak of a line of prose as containing so many words, the number being of little consequence; in poetry, syllables are considered rather than words, and importance is attached to the number receiving a stress or accent. A line is named according to the number of stressed syllables it contains.* It is called monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, octameter, according as it contains one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, or eight accented syllables. Here are examples:

Monometer: Away!

Dimeter: This song of mine

Trimeter: Heroic womanhood

Tetrameter: Lilies whiter than the snow

Pentameter: The poet in a golden clime was born

Hexameter: This is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks

Heptameter: There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away

Octameter: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

We note in passing that not all stressed syllables receive the same degree of voice emphasis. In the tetrameter line,

* This statement may be modified by those who recognize a metrical foot containing two stresses.

for example, than receives a lighter accent than is given to snow. In the second place we note that no syllable is accented which would not naturally be stressed in prose, though to bring out the swing, the cadence, the voice at times varies slightly the natural degree of emphasis.

To describe a line with precision, more must be known than merely the number of stresses it contains; the unaccented syllables must be considered. For convenience, the line is thought of as made up of syllable groups called feet, and these too have names. A foot of two syllables the first of which receives the accent is called a trochee. A foot of two syllables the second of which receives the accent is called an iambus. A foot of three syllables the first of which receives the accent is called a dactyl. A foot of three syllables the third of which receives the accent is called an anapaest. These are the principal kinds, though a number of others are recognized by some authorities, notably the amphibrach, or a foot of three syllables the second of which receives the accent. Here are examples:

Trochee: silver
Iambus: beware

Dactyl: glittering
Anapaest: to the brave

Amphibrach: flow gently

The adjectives derived from these nouns are trochaic, iambic, dactylic, anapaestic, amphibrachic. Hence we may speak of trochaic, iambic, dactylic, anapaestic, or amphibrachic lines, meaning that they are made up of trochees, iambics, dactyls, anapaests, or amphibrachs. And by combining these adjectives with the words monometer, dimeter, etc., we have such terms as trochaic dimeter, iambic pentameter, etc. Here are a few examples: Iambic monometer: Be gone!

Iambic dimeter: The day | is done