8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

INTERJECTIONAL OR EXCLAMATORY STATEMENTS.

O peace of mind! repairer of decay,

Whose balms

renew the limbs to labours of the day;

Care shuns thy soft approach, and sullen flies away.

Thou unassuming common place7
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which love makes for thee!

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call to-day his own!

He who secure within can say,

DRYDEN.

To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.

DRYDEN.

Eternal Hope! when yonder spheres sublime
Pealed their first notes to sound the march of time
Thy joyous youth began-but not to fade.

CAMPBELL.

Beautiful objects10 of the wild bee's love!
The wild bird joys your opening bloom to see,
And in your native woods and wilds to be;
All hearts to nature true ye strangely move;
Ye are so passing fair-so passing free.

71

14.

TO THE RAINBOW.

How glorious is thy girdle cast
O'er mountain, tower, and town,
Or mirrored in the ocean vast,
A thousand fathoms down!

As fresh in yon horizon dark,
As young thy beauties seem,
As when the eagle from the ark
First sported in thy beam.

A SUMMER EVENING.

CAMPBELL.

15. How fine has the day been, how bright was the sun,
How lovely and joyful the course that he run,
Though he rose in a mist when his race he begun,
And there followed some droppings of rain!
But now
the fair traveller's come to the west,
His rays
are all gold, and his beauties are best;
He paints the sky gay, as he sinks to his rest,
And foretells a bright rising again.

16.

RAIN IN SUMMER.

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and the heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,

How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,

Like the tramp of hoofs!

How it gushes and struggles out

DR. WATTS.

From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane

It pours and pours;

And swift and wide,

With a muddy tide,

Like a river down the gutter roars

The rain, the welcome rain!

LONGFELLOW.

1. The loch, or arm of the sea which the two runaways were crossing. 2. Of heaven. 3. These lines are uttered by Satan, after he has been cast down. 4. This is the last line of Satan's address to the fallen angels. 5. News. 6. Anxiety produces sleeplessness. 7. Spoken to the daisy. 8. Secure-used here in the old sense of free from care. 9. The stars and planets, which were believed to make celestial music. 10. Spoken to the flowers. (To p. 70 and 71.)

CHAPTER XIV.

COMPARATIVE STATEMENTS, OR SIMILES.

THIS kind of statement might have been classed under the head of Level Affirmative. But the books on "elocution" all agree in stating that a simile ought to be read in a lower tone, and at a quicker pace, than the rest of the statement. This direction, if mechanically and unthinkingly obeyed, might produce bad reading. The right direction to be given here is, that the pupil should have a due sense of the proportion which the simile bears to the chief statement; and, as the simile can never be equal to the chief statement, that proportion must be fractional or inferior. (No. 9 is an exception to this general view.)

Before reading these sentences aloud, it would be well to have the similes explained and questioned upon.

1.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.1

3.

And thy heart as pure as they;

One of God's holy messengers
Did walk with me that day.

True ease in writing

comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learnt to dance.

4. The illusion3 that great men and great events came oftener in early times than now, is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range of equi-distant columns, the farthest off look the closest; so the conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more remote they are.

5.

descending,
with redness,
like a prairie,

And the evening sun,
Set the clouds on fire
Burned the broad sky,
Left upon the level water

One long track and trail

of splendour,

Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapours,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.

6. I saw their chief tall as a rock of ice; his spear fir; his shield the rising moon; he sat on the shore of mist upon the hill.

7.

the blasted like a cloud

There was such silence through the host, as when
An earthquake trampling on some populous town,
Has crushed ten thousand with one tread, and men
Expect the second.

8. It is on the death-bed, on the couch of sorrow and of pain, that the thought of one purely virtuous action is like the shadow o a lofty rock in the desert-like the light footsteps of that little child who continued to dance before the throne of the unjust king, when his guards had fled, and his people had forsaken him—like the single thin stream of light which the unhappy captive has at last learned to love-like the soft sigh before the breeze that wafts the becalmed vessel and her famished crew to the haven where they would be.

9.

10.

Sweet is the scene when virtue dies!
When sinks a righteous soul to rest,
How mildly beam the closing eyes,
How gently heaves th' expiring breast!

So fades a summer cloud away,

So sinks the gale when storms are o'er
So gently shuts the eye of day,

So dies a wave along the shore.

A cloud lay cradled near the setting sun:
A gleam of crimson tinged its braided snow.
Long had I watched its glory moving on
O'er the still radiance of the lake below;
Tranquil its spirit seemed and floated slow,
Even in its very motion there was rest,
And every breath of eve that chanced to blow
Wafted the traveller to the beauteous west.

WATTS.

11.

12.

COMPARATIVE STATEMENTS, OR SIMILES.

Emblem, methought, of the departed soul,
To whose white robe the gleam of bliss is given,
And by the breath of mercy made to roll
Right onward to the golden gates of heaven,
Where to the eye of faith it peaceful lies
And tells to man his glorious destinies.

JOHN WILSON.

He spoke and Sohrab kindled at his taunts,
And he too drew his sword; at once they rushed
Together as two eagles on one prey

Come rushing down together from the clouds,

One from the east, one from the west; their shields
Dashed with a clang together, and a din
Rose, such as that the sinewy woodcutters
Make often in the forest's heart at morn,
Of hewing axes, crashing trees-such blows
Rustum and Sohrab on each other hailed.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

hath found

as she rose

As when some hunter in the spring
A brooding eagle sitting on her nest
Upon the craggy isle of a hill lake,
And pierced her with an arrow
And followed her, to find her where she fell
Far off;-anon her mate comes winging back
From hunting, and a great way off descries
His huddling young left sole; at that he checks
His pinion, and with short uneasy sweeps
Circles above his eyry with loud screams
Chiding his mate back to her nest; but she
Lies dying, with the arrow in her side,
In some far stony gorge, out of his ken,
A heap of fluttering feathers, never
Shall the lake glass her flying over it;
Never the black and dripping precipices
Echo her stormy scream as she sails by-
As that poor bird flies home, nor knows his loss,
So Rustum knew not his own loss,
Over his dying son, and knew him not.

more

but stood

MATTHEW ARNOLD.*

75

1. This verse is from Professor Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus. 2. That is, true power of expression. 3. The common, but deceptive belief. 4. This simile is from Ossian. (To pp. 73 and 74.)

*These two similes-from the poem of Sohrab and Rustum-are among the finest similes in all literature. The simple and adequate expression is as fine and satisfactory as the truth of the conception.