Pbrasal Power Words are things. They seem endowed with life. They have an almost human existence. Springing into being at the promptings of nature, they live through ages and are passed from one human being to another, gathering associations as they go till they come to us, their latest users, carrying a burden of meaning we do not stop to realize. Home, parents, morning, Sabbath, battle, peace, patriotism are such words. Pronounce them one at a time and wait for the thronging images to come into your mind. How each brings up its own series of pictures, bright at first, then fading quickly away but to give place to others equally vivid! Is it of morning you are thinking? Then the pictures are flashing landscapes glittering in the first rosy colors of the approaching dawn; they are dark and sullen with the driving mists from northern lakes; they are clear and brilliant with distant snow-capped mountains, the cold breath from which stirs the blood like new wine; they are pictures of the narrow, oppressive walls that hemmed you in on that dismal morn of your first bitter disappointment, or the wide aisles of the forest in which you wandered after you had achieved your first triumph in your struggles with the world. There are adjectives, too, that have a similar power and when they are combined with the right nouns, they restrict the number of the pictures we may call up but intensify those we see. Summer is a suggestive word but when Lowell speaks of "lavish summer" we are caught by the extravagant richness and beauty of the season and recognize the brilliancy of a phrase we should never have thought of uttering. Bryant speaks of the "rocking billows" and the aptness of the expression intensifies our view as it shuts out the "bounding billows" we had seen. Bryant has the "all beholding sun" and Lowell the "unscarred heaven." Going a step farther and attributing to inanimate things some of the qualities of the living, Goldsmith calls the desolate waste about his "sweet Auburn," the "pensive plain " and Whittier, feeling the presence of his family even in the deserted home, hears no step on the "conscious floor." All these phrases attract our attention and appeal to our æsthetic sense. Again Whittier tells us of a low green tent, and carries out his figure by adding "whose curtain never outward swings." The shuddering horror of the grave is not before us, but the peace and quiet of a restful home. The word phrase we do not use in its strict grammatical sense but with a wider meaning. The phrase is a unit of literary expression and may be of considerable length and even include a whole |