Puslapio vaizdai
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Sweet to the sight is Zabran's flowery plain;
At once by maids and shepherds loved in vain!
No more the virgins shall delight to rove
By Sargis' bank, or Irwan's shady grove;
On Tarkie's mountains catch the cooling gale,
Or breathe the sweets of Aly's flowery vale:
Fair scene! but, ah! no more with peace possest,
With ease alluring, and with plenty blest!

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No more the shepherd's whitening tents appear,

Nor the kind products of a bounteous year;
No more the date, with snowy blossoms crowned!
But ruin spreads her baleful fires around.

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Secander.

In vain Circassia boasts her spicy groves,
Forever famed for pure and happy loves:
In vain she boasts her fairest of the fair,
Their eyes blue languish, and their golden hair!
Those eyes in tears their fruitless grief must send;
Those hairs the Tartar's cruel hand shall rend.

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Wild as his land, in native deserts bred,
By lust incited, or by malice led,
The villian Arab, as he prowls for prey,

1 Rule XIII.

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Oft marks with blood and wasting flames the way.
Yet none so cruel as the Tartar foe,

To death inured, and nursed in scenes of wo.

He said; when loud along the vale was heard
A shriller shriek; and nearer fires appeared;
The affrighted shepherds, through the dews of night,
Wide o'er the moonlight hills renewed their flight.

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CHAPTER XIII

RELICS.—[IRVING.]

1. My first visit was to the house where Shakspeare was born, and where, according to tradition, he was brought up to his father's craft of wool-combing. It is a small mean-looking edifice of wood and plaster, a true nestling-place of genius, which seems to delight in hatching its offspring in by-corners.

2. The walls of its squalid chambers are covered with names and inscriptions in every language, by pilgrims of all nations, ranks, and conditions, from the prince to the peasant; and present a simple, but striking instance of the spontaneous and universal homage of mankind to the great poet of nature.

3. The house is shown by a garrulous old lady, in a frosty red face, lighted up by a cold,1 blue,1 anxious1 eye, and garnished with artificial locks of flaxen hair, curling from under an exceedingly dirty cap. She was peculiarly assiduous in exhibiting the relics with which this, like all other celebrated shrines, abounds.

4. There was the shattered stock of the very matchRule XV Rem. 4. NOTE.

lock with which Shakspeare shot the deer in his pouching exploits. There, too, was his tobacco box; which proves that he was a rival smoker of Sir Walter Raleigh; the sword also with which he played Hamlet; and the identical lantern with which Friar Laurence discovered Romeo and Juliet at the tomb!

5. There was an ample supply also of Shakspeare's mulberry-tree, which seems to have as extraordinary powers of self-multiplication as the wood of the true cross; of which there is enough extant to build a ship of the line.

6. The most favorite object of curiosity, however, is Shakspeare's chair. It stands in the chimney-nook of a small gloomy chamber, just1 behind what was his father's shop. Here he may many a time have sat when a boy, watching the slowly revolving spit with all the longing of an urchin; or of an evening,2 listening to the cronies and gossips of Stratford, dealing forth church-yard tales and legendary anecdotes of the troublesome times of England.

7. In this chair, it is the custom of every one that visits the house to sit: whether this be done with the hope of imbibing any of the inspiration of the bard I am at a loss to say I merely mention the fact; and mine hostess privately assured me, that, though built of solid oak, such was the fervent zeal of devotees, that the chair had to be new-bottomed at least once in three years.

8. It is worthy of notice also, in the history of this extraordinary chair, that it partakes something of the volatile nature of the Santa Casa of Loretto, or the flying chair of the Arabian enchanter; for though sold some

1 Rule XXI, Rem. 14. 2 Of an evening is an adjunct of sat.He may have sat, i. e., in or during an evening.

few years since to a northern princess, yet strange to tell, it has found its way back again to the old chimney cor

ner.

HOW PAIN CAN BE A CAUSE OF DELIGHT.-[BURKE.]

1. Providence has so ordered it, that a state of rest and inaction, however it may flatter our indolence, should be productive of many inconveniences; that it should generate such disorders, as may force us to have recourse to some labor, as a thing absolutely requisite to make us pass our lives with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions.*

2. At the same time, that, in this languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, and despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of the body.

3. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labor; and labor is a surmounting of difficulties, an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles; and as such, resembles pain, which consists in tension or contraction, in every thing but degree.

4. Labor is not only requisite to preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their functions; but it is equally

* How many simple sentences in this paragraph? How are they connected?

+ Supply before that, " providence has so ordered it." 1 Rule XX, Rem. 1.

necessary to these finer and more delicate organs, on which, and by which, the imagination and perhaps the other mental powers act.

5. Now, as a due exercise is essential to the coarse niuscular parts of the constitution, and that without this rousing they would become languid and diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer parts we have mentioned; to have them in proper order, they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE.

Language, especially in poetry, is often employed figuratively. See Gram. under Figures of Syntax. The figures most frequently occurring are

1. The METAPHOR-a comparison involved in a single word; as "The lively diamond drinks thy purest rays."

In this line the word drinks is used under the figure of a metaphor; there is a comparison implied associating the diamond, in the thoughts of the reader,with some animated being, and imparting to the whole line, interest and beauty. This figure occurs very frequently in both prose and poetry.

2. A SIMILE an express and formal comparison; as

Like leaning masts of stranded ships, appear
The pines that near the coast their summits rear

The pines are compared to leaning masts.

1 Rule XXI, Rem. 11.

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