William Atkinson - The Complete Works of William Walker Atkinson

Notice the suggestive force of the following passage from Tennyson, the words of which impress upon one with an almost weird effect the silent old house, its dim uncanny reminiscent atmosphere of the past, its mysterious spirit of the by-gone presences which haunt the old scenes:

“All day within the dreary house

The doors upon their hinges creaked,

The blue fly sang in the pane, the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscoat shrieked,

Or from the crevice peered about;

Old faces glimmered thro’ the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.”

The following quotations will also give the student an idea of the powerfully suggestive effective effect of words and arrangement of words. We give these examples for the purpose of enabling the student to grasp the actual effect of suggestive words and sentences, believing that the idea may be better grasped in this way than by the attempt to follow any arbitrary rule. It is most difficult to enunciate a rule in this case—example and imitation work the best results. Listening to the conversation of a strong speaker, or reading the speeches of the best orators, Will do more to form the idea of force in the mind of the student than would pages of arbitrary rules or general advice. Read the following quotations slowly and carefully, endeavoring to feel the suggestive force of the words, and in the associations called forth by the arrangement:

ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES.

“Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it were early June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of these houses showed through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various fruit trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, while his antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored bridge below.”—LOWELL: Cambridge Thirty Years Ago .

“There was in the court a peculiar silence somehow; and the scene remained long in Esmond’s memory:—the sky bright overhead; the buttresses of the building and the sun-dial casting shadow over the gilt memento mori inscribed underneath; the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel nearly white, the one with his face up to the sun, and the other snuffing amongst the grass and stones, and my lord leaning over the fountain, which was bubbling audibly.

“How well all things were remembered! The ancient towers and gables of the ball darkling against the east, the purple shadows on the green slopes, the quaint devices and carvings of the dial, the forest-crowned heights, the fair, yellow plain cheerful with crops and corn, the shining river rolling through it towards the pearly hills beyond,—all these were before us, along with a thousand beautiful memories of our youth, beautiful and sad, but as real and vivid in our minds as that fair and always-remembered scene our eyes beheld once more.”—THACKERAY: Henry Esmond.

“It was an exquisite January morning in which there was no threat of rain, but a grey sky making the calmest back-ground for the charms of a mild winter scene:—the grassy borders of the lanes, the hedge-rows sprinkled with red berries and haunted with low twitterings, the purple bareness of the elms, the rich brown of the furrows.”—George Eliot: Daniel Deronda .

“So much describes the stuffy little room.

Vulgar, flat, smooth respectability:

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 .