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consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention.

5. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, a daughter, or sis- 115 ter in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in 120 funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the desertion and silence of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man-if all at once he should hear the deathlike still- 125 ness broken up by the sounds of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, 130 and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible by reaction.

6. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the 135 fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to 146 the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable?*

LITERARY ANALYSIS.-115-119. If... life. matically? Rhetorically?

What kind of sentence gram

119-131. Or if... resumed. Is this a period or a loose sentence?-Point out striking expressions in this sentence.

134-159. Paragraph 6 presents an excellent study in variety of sentencesvariety of length and of type, grammatical and rhetorical. Pupils may indicate the various kinds of sentence in this paragraph.

136. sensible. Meaning?

140. has forgot. Query as to this form.

In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated-cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide 145 and succession of human affairs-locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested-laid asleep-tranced-racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished;* and all must pass self-withdrawn into 150 a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is that, when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has 155 made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

7. O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, 100 simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers-like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be 165 no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert*—but that, the farther we progress in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!

LITERARY ANALYSIS.—144, 145. must be insulated. By what two variant forms of expression does De Quincey amplify the idea here expressed? 148. is suddenly arrested. What variations are made on this statement? 151. syncope and suspension. Discriminate between these synonyms. 152. when the deed is done. How is this expression varied? — Are such repetitions chargeable with tautology, or are they justified as examples of artistic fulness and elaboration?

160-169. What figure is exemplified in the last paragraph? (See Def. 28.) -Give in your own words the substance of the paragraph.

II.-A DREAM FUGUE.

1. Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character—a tumultuous dream, commencing with a music such as now I often heard in sleep, music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the Coronation Anthem; and, like that, gave the feeling of 5 a multitudinous movement, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where-some- 10 how, but I knew not how-by some beings, but I knew not by whom―a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its stages—was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nat- 15 ure, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon 20 me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and 25 fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, with heart- 30 breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverber ated-everlasting farewells!

2. And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no more!"

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CHARACTERIZATION BY TAINE.'

1. Byron was a poet, but in his own fashion-a strange fashion, like that in which he lived. There were internal tempests within him, avalanches of ideas, which found issue only in writing. He

From the History of English Literature, by H. A. Taine.

dreams of himself and sees himself throughout. It is a boiling torrent, but hedged in with rocks.

2. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination; he could not metamorphose himself into another. They are his own sorrows, his own revolts, his own travels, which, hardly transformed and modified, he introduces into his verses. He does not invent, he observes; he does not create, he transcribes. His copy is darkly exaggerated, but it is a copy. "I could not write upon anything," says he, "without some personal experience and foundation." You will find in his letters and note-book, almost feature for feature, the most striking of his descriptions. The capture of Ismail, the shipwreck of Don Juan, are, almost word for word, like two accounts of it in prose. If none but cockneys could attribute to him the crimes of his heroes, none but blind men could fail to see in him the sentiments of his characters. This is so true, that he has not created more than one. Childe Harold, Lara, The Giaour, The Corsair, Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Tasso, Dante, and the rest, are always the same-one man represented under various costumes, in several lands, with different expressions; but just as painters do when, by change of garments, decorations, and attitudes, they draw fifty portraits from the same model.

3. He meditated too much upon himself to be enamoured of anything else. The habitual sternness of his will prevented his mind from being flexible; his force, always concentrated for effort and strained for strife, shut him up in self-contemplation, and reduced him never to make a poem save of his own heart. He lavishes upon us his opinions, recollections, angers, tastes; his poem is a conversation, a confidence, with the ups and downs, the rudeness and the freedom of a conversation and a confidence, almost like the holographic journal at which, by night, at his writing-table, he opened his heart and discharged his feelings. Never was seen in such a clear glass the birth of a lively thought, the tumult of a great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, always impassioned, inexhaustibly fertile and creative, in whom suddenly, successively, finished and adorned, bloomed all human emotions and ideas-sad, gay, lofty, low, hustling one another, mutually impeded, like swarms of insects that go humming and feeding on flowers and in the mud. He may say what he will

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