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II. Mental and Oral: We speak literally of gabbling geese; a buzzing saw; bitter chocolate; a chilly breeze; hard wood; green leaves; ripe fruits; soft foods; boiling water; sharp teeth; graceful children; a happy child; a sly fox; a grinning clown; a flying bird. Use each of these epithets figuratively of as many things as possible.

III. Mental: Try to find in your own thought some good reasons for the use of figures in language. Are they useful chiefly for convenience or for pleasure?

IV. Written Begin in your wordbooks a collection of pleasing word pictures chiefly or wholly literal, citing the If literal and figurative language are author wherever known. If literal and figurative combined, as is common, underscore the words not used literally.

THE RHODORA *

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

* Reprinted by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Company, authorized publishers of Emerson's works.

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THE PLEASURE DERIVED FROM FIGURES

Burns says of the mountain daisy:

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm.

Here the words "bitter-biting north," "birth," "cheerful," and glinted" can none of them be used with literal truth. Yet they swiftly give us the contrasted mind pictures of the daisy and its bleak surroundings. Will you now try to put into plain, matter-of-fact language the thoughts given in these lines? -If you have paused to try, as I hope you did, I think you will see that beauty has vanished, as well as simplicity. Only masters of thought and of language have power, as did Burns, thus to convey into our minds the beautiful pictures born in their own.

You see by this one example how figures shorten and condense speech. It is convenient, as well as economical of time and effort, to say, "Bite, frost, bite; " for thus by a single epithet a whole story is told. We enjoy this suggestion of a likeness between two unlike things; and, aside from the fact of convenience, the new, the unusual, the unexpected, brings to us a pleasure of its own.

Poets speak of "piping winds," of "happy dew," of a

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"chattering brook," of an "angry wind;" Longfellow says, "The wood-fire clapped its hands of flame;" and Lowell,

Hang my idle armor up on the wall:

Let it be the spider's banquet hall.

Tennyson gives these pictures:

The black bat, night, has flown.

The Old Year lies a-dying.

He dragged his eye-brow bushes down, and made
A snowy pent-house for his hollow eyes.

These figures give us pleasure, at the same moment, iu several different ways. Perhaps we make swift mind pictures; perhaps we recognize new and interesting resemblances; perhaps we delight in the beauty of the language for its own sake. You may have seen some child wear a string of amber beads, or may have noticed some other beautiful article made from amber. Your geography tells you that amber is found For many years no washed up on the shores of certain seas. one knew its origin, altho it is now supposed to be the resin of pine forests that lived when Earth was young. The quick fancy of John Milton, who was a master weaver of figures, seized upon this word amber and painted a beautiful word picture with it. He speaks of a sea nymph with amber-dropping hair; and at once our thought paints a mermaid sitting beneath the salt sea waves with amber pearls rolling off her yellow locks. That this figure may give us pleasure depends upon several things: first, upon our knowledge of the color of amber, of its precious nature, and of its sea origin; second, upon our recognizing swiftly the resemblance in color between pale yellow

amber and flaxen tresses; third, upon our ability to form a mind picture corresponding to the word picture; and, last, upon our own feeling for the beauty of the poet's fanciful idea as to the origin of amber.

It follows from this that if a beautiful figure gives no pleasure, or if it conveys no meaning whatever, the reason may lie in one's lack of knowledge. We cannot re-cognize, or know again, what we have never known before. Hence it follows, also, that figurative language is often a sealed treasure box to the ignorant mind. Happily, figures need not be drawn from obscure sources in order to be beautiful; and literature is full of imagery that is simple enough for a young child.

Here is an example of this:

The night has a thousand eyes,

And the day but one;

Yet the light of the bright world dies

With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies

When love is done.

Francis W. Bourdillon.

And here is another:

When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurl'd her standard to the air,

She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there;
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,
And striped its pure, celestial white,

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With streakings of the morning light;
Then from his mansion in the sun
She call'd her eagle-bearer down,

And gave into his mighty hand

The symbol of her chosen land.

From "The American Flag," by Joseph Rodman
Drake.

Baldric means a belt; here, the Milky Way. Are you so fortunate as to have your own bedroom window look toward the east? If If so, have you learned to know and to love those wonderful "streakings of the morning light" to be seen frequently for a little while just before the sun rises? If you have, you will at once recognize the resemblance between our barred banner and the crimson-barred sky. After this famous stanza is familiar to you, I fancy that the poet's name for those wonderful sky effects will come often to your mind.

I shall give you here two of the most famous morning songs that the English language knows. The first is literal, except for the word "dew-pearled."

In this poem the child Pippa, filled with youth and hope and joy, exulting in the common, everyday features of the spring