William Atkinson - The Essential Works of William Walker Atkinson - 50+ Books in One Edition

Not so the burst of landscape surging in,

Sunrise and all, as he who of the pair

Is, plain enough, the younger personage

Draws sharp the shrieking curtain, sends aloft

The sash, spreads wide and fastens back to wall

Shutter and shutter, shows you England’s best.

He leans into a living glory-bath

Of air and light, where seems to float and move

The wooded, watered country, hill and dale

And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist,

A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift O’

the sun-touched dew.”—BROWNING: The Inn Album .

“Night Is a dead, monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in houses when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the out-door world are on their feet. It is then that the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.”—STEVENSON: Travels with a Donkey .

“Pathetic little tumble-down old houses, all out of drawing and perspective, nestled like old spiders’ webs between the buttresses of the great cathedral.”—DU MAURIER: Trilby .

“The light seemed to go out of his eyes and leave them like stale opals.”—KIPLING: The Second Jungle-Book .

“The fog was driven apart for a moment, and the sun shone, a blood-red wafer, on the water.”—KIPLING: Plain Tales from the Hills .

“The aftermath of the dust storm came up and drove us down-wind like pieces of paper,”—IBID.

“But the walls were made of screens of marble tracery—beautiful, milk-white fretwork, set with agates and carnelians and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the openwork, casting shadows on the ground like black-velvet embroidery.”—KIPLING: The Jungle-Book .

“The feeling of unhappiness he had never known before covered him as water covers a log.”—KIPLING: The Second Jungle-Book .

“The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the face as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling place, lying away from the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within.”—PATER: Marius the Epicurean .

“About six miles from the renowned city of the Manhattoes, in that sound or arm of the sea which passes between the mainland and Nassau, or Long Island, there is a narrow strait, where the current is violently compressed between shouldering promontories and horribly perplexed rocks and shoals. Being, at the best of times, a very violent, impetuous current, it takes these impediments in mighty dudgeon, boiling in whirlpools; brawling and fretting in ripples; raging and roaring in rapids and breakers; and, in short, indulging in all sorts of wrong-headed paroxysms. At such times, woe to any unlucky vessel that ventures within its clutches. This termagant humor, however, prevails only at certain times of tide. At low water, for instance, it is as pacific a stream as you would wish to see; but as the tide rises it begins to fret; at half tide it roars with might and main like a bull bellowing for more drink; but when the tide is full it relapses into quiet, and, for a time, sleeps as soundly as an alderman after dinner.”—IRVING.

“The morning broke with sinister brightness; the air alarmingly transparent, the sky pure, the rim of the horizon clear and strong against the heavens. The wind and the wild seas, now vastly swollen, indefatigably hunted us. I stood on deck, choking with fear; I seemed to lose all power upon my limbs; my knees were as paper when she plunged into the murderous valleys; my heart collapsed when some black mountain fell in avalanche beside her counter, and the water, that was more than spray, swept round my ankles like a torrent. I was conscious of but one strong desire, to bear myself decently in my terrors, and whatever should happen to my life, preserve my character: as the captain said, we are a queer kind of beasts. Breakfast time came, and I made shift to swallow some hot tea. Then I must stagger below to take the time, reading the chronometer with dizzy eyes, and marveling the while what value there could be in observations taken in a ship launched (as ours then was) like a missile among flying seas. The forenoon dragged on in a grinding monotony of peril; every spoke of the wheel a rash, but an obliged experiment—rash as a forlorn hope, needful as the leap that lands a fireman from a burning staircase. Noon was made; the captain dined on his day’s work, and I on watching him; and our place was entered on the chart with a meticulous precision which seemed half pitiful and half absurd, since the next eye to behold that sheet of paper might be the eye of an exploring fish. One o’clock came, then two; the captain gloomed and chafed, as he held to the coaming of the house, and if ever I saw dormant murder in man’s eye, it was in his. God help the hand that should have disobeyed him.”— STEVENSON: The Wrecker .

Table of Content

QUACKENBOS SAYS: “Figurative Language implies a departure from the simple or ordinary mode of expression; a clothing of ideas in words which not only convey the meaning, but, through a comparison or some other means of exciting the imagination, convey it in such a way as to make a lively and forcible impression on the mind. Thus, if we say: ‘Saladin was shrewd in the council, braw in the field,’ we express the thought in the simplest manner. But if we vary the expression thus: ‘Saladin was a fox in the council, a lion in the field,’ we clothe the same sentiment in figurative language. Instead of cunning and courage, iWe introduce the animals that possess these qualities in the highest degree, and thus present livelier images to the mind.”

What are known as “figures of rhetoric” are the numerous individuals of a large class of language forms, the characteristic quality of which is deviation from the ordinary, plain and practical application of words. We find them everywhere in all forms of verbal expression. They give beauty, life and strength to style, and, as Scott says: “it would perhaps be truer to say that they have the power of arousing in the reader or hearer the same emotional and imaginative processes which gave birth to them in the mind of the writer .” In other words, they are powerful instruments or agents of suggestion .

Rhetoricians have devoted much time, attention and space to the task of analyzing, defining and classifying the various rhetorical figures. By refining the definitions and classification, some authorities have succeeded in enumerating nearly three hundred classes of rhetorical figures. Such classification is, however, of but little practical value to the general student. The modern text. books generally confine themselves to a consideration of not over ten or twelve of the more important classes. The following are the more important Rhetorical Figures of Imagery: