my saddlebags by my side. As I lay in the dust of the road my old gray mare run up the hill, and as she turned the top she waved her tail back at me, seemingly to say fare ye well, brother Watkins—ah! I tell you, my brethering, it is affecting times to part with a congregation you have been with for over thirty years-ah!" CHAPTER XII DESCRIPTIVE EXPRESSION MENTAL PROCESSES As we have seen, logical expression deals principally with facts, events, and the relations of ideas. Description endeavors to reproduce or image forth things. Practice in descriptive reading stimulates our powers of observation rather than of reasoning, or of mere abstract knowledge. The higher forms of description do more than help us to see things; they help us to gain insight into things, and especially to see beauty where at first we saw merely the thing. "Great Britain is an island off the continent of Europe" tells us a fact. But the following paragraph helps us to see a portion of it. It is Washington Irving's description of his first view of our mother country: "From that time until the period of arrival it was all feverish excitement. The ships of war, that prowled like guardian. giants around the coast; the headlands of Ireland, stretching out into the channel; the Welsh mountains, towering into the clouds, - all were objects of intense interest. As we sailed up the Mersey, I reconnoitered the shores with a telescope. My eye dwelt with delight on neat cottages, with their trim shrubberies and green grassplots. I saw the mouldering ruins of an abbey overrun with ivy, and the taper spire of a village church rising from the brow of a neighboring hill; all were character istic of England." But poetic description does still more for us. It awakens all sorts of noble or beautiful associations and emotions in connection with the object described. A great poet will give us more in a few words than an inferior author can put into pages. Compare, for instance, even Irving's delightful word pictures with one line from Shakespeare, "England, bound in with the triumphant sea.” In the introduction we illustrated the processes of imaginative picturing. The more vividly we can see these mental images the better. Close your eyes and endeavor to recall some beautiful or exciting scene in your past experience, concentrating your mind upon it until each detail stands out vividly. Then take a similar scene in literature, and endeavor to bring it before your mind's eye in the same way. This process is sometimes called visualizing. There are those who can call up sounds in this way, others to whom the words " a rose calls up not merely its appearance but a faint reminiscence of its perfume, or to whom the word "velvet" suggests its texture, "snowball" the chill as well as the size, shape, and solid pressure of it; while almost any one can imagine something like the taste, or at least the pleasure of tasting, a favorite dish. The more perfectly one can recall all these sensations, the truer to nature will his descriptions of these things be. By way of example of imaginative analysis let us take the following, from Each and All: "The delicate shells lay on the shore; The mere facts may be stated in a few commonplace words: "As I walked on the beach I saw at my feet some pretty and fragile shells that had just been cast up by the waves." But even the dullest reader will feel that this does not excite his imagination as the poet's words did. And, as we realize this, we shall see why poetry, or indeed any form of imaginative literature, comes to be written at all. Is it not because the poet has a clearer vision of beauty than other people, and in his endeavor to make the vision as clear to others as to himself, he seizes on the words which most fully express or paint his ideas? The first three lines call up an image of what all of us who live near the ocean have often seen, and what every one may easily imagine. But to make the picture complete, we must see more than the poet has put into words. Beyond the shore or beach we must see the ocean, above both sea and shore the blue sky, with perhaps a cloud here and there; see the gulls soaring aloft, and maybe catch a breath of the salt smell of the ocean. Certainly, we must hear in the next line, "The bellowing of the savage sea,” or we cannot realize the poet's thought that the ocean is some monster pursuing the delicate shell which just escapes being seized by the "retreating wave." We said above that words stood not only for things, but for feelings about things. The poet does not always put these feelings into words. He leaves them to be inferred. The picture which Emerson has given us here is a picture of loveliness enhanced by contrast with a background suggestive of savage, vindictive hate. Now, to realize the possibilities of this stanza, we must feel toward "the delicate shells" and "the savage sea as he did. At first we love, or at least admire, the beauty of the scene. But our feeling toward the ocean must change to antagonism, because in this poem the waves are represented with unlovely traits. Later in the poem, when the writer has fetched his "sea-born treasures home," they in turn become unlovely. "But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar." Here the mood of the writer has changed, and the reader must feel the new emotions if he would render the lines as the poet conceived them. Such are some of the mental processes which must precede the reading of descriptive prose or poetry. Some of us, who are gifted with vivid imaginations, will find it easy to reproduce in our own minds the pictures of another, but most of us will have difficulty in doing it at first. But the pleasure we shall take in re-creating a work of art step by step is almost as great as that of original composition, and will more than repay us for our trouble. Even those of us who are seemingly devoid of creative imagination may derive enjoyment from working out the problems of creative composition as one would solve a puzzle. An amusing, as well as useful, exercise is to draw a series of sketches of the objects described. The pictures need not have any artistic merit, but we should try to put in the foreground the important or emphatic elements, and have the rest more or less in the background. You will find, however, that the most beautiful verbal pictures cannot be drawn. They must be painted with sound and suggested by action. Where sounds are described, try to imagine that you hear them, as in the following example : |