But while you flee for your life from John the Idealess, you will find in Carlyle's "French Revolution," or in the writings of Thomas Fuller, figures all fresh, and flashing by the hundred; while the wit and whimsicality of Fuller will tickle you to your heart's content. Or for a lofty delight, hasten to Burke, “the supreme writer of his century," as De Quincey has well said of him. Mark in the following what excellent use Fuller makes of one of the homeliest of facts:

"To use force before people are fairly taught the truth, is to knock a nail into a board without wimbling a hole in it, which then either not enters, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it pierceth."

What a pity and shame that such a writer is so little read!

We close our discussion of the metaphor with "The Three Mourners," translated by us from the German of Chamisso, and never presented in English before. In this translation we claim the whole of the metaphor in line eighteenth

"A thunder-bolt borne on a thunder-cloud;"

and we have expunged the coarse sneer in the original, which represents the widow as mourning only three weeks" drey wochen:"

"From vale and from mountain bursts the cry

'To arms! to arms! the invader is nigh!'

See hastily riding, from near and far,

Our choicest youth to Freedom's war.
Severe the hour and dark with fate;
Full many a home left desolate.

'Stern war! Thou takest each dearest one,
My blooming bridegroom; my brother; my son !'
Woman's hand fits out for battle's rough bed:
The bride puts the helm on her lover's head;
Sister brings the black steed he loves so well;
Mother opens the gate, and weeps- Farewell!'

'My bridegroom! my brother! my son!-again
When comest thou back? Quick! Tell us when!'
'When air and water and land are free

From invasion's taint, I'm again with thee.'
They are off, with a cheer, and a neighing loud—
A thunder-bolt borne on a thunder-cloud.

"The time is long; far away the camp;

But we listen each night for his war-steed's tramp.
Day drags after day. Night's dark and dreary;
No horseman returns. We're weary, weary!'
At last 'tis a horse, with a rapid tread;
No horseman there-the bridle is red.

They crowd around him; the blood-marks see-
'Why com'st thou alone? He-where is he?
Hast thou left him bleeding, untended, alone?
Give me back my bridegroom; my brother; my son!
They have slain my hero! O steed accursed,

Why left ye him dying, in blood and thirst?'
The steed seemed to answer, the lightning-eyed,

'I've brought you his message!' Then reeled and died.

"To the gory field have hastened the three,

To seek the lone mound where their loved one may be.
They sat them down by that bloody bed:

At the feet, at the side, and one at the head.
At the head the mother; and at the side
The sister dear; at the feet the bride.
'O woe! O woe! Broken-hearted here,
Who knows our bitterness, loneliness, fear?
Yet we willingly gave him to God's great strife,
For a threatened homestead, a nation's life.
Yet we're but women! Life's light hath fled!
Our only joy, to bemoan the dead.'

"The bride and the sister wept long and sore;
But the years went by-they wept no more.
But lifelong tears mother's love supplied,

Till she slept in his grave by her young hero's side."

CHAPTER IX.

FIGURES OF RHETORIC.

PART FOURTH.

Metonymy.-Synecdoché.-Metalepsis.

XXXVII. THE class of figures now to be considered is Metonymy: a title that comes from two Greek words, which, with Athenian precision, mean "a change of name or noun." That is, metonymy lies always in a noun, never in an adjective or in a verb. Mark that point. Molière, the great French comedian, tells of one who, taking to grammar late in life, was amazed to find that he had all his life been using substantives, adverbs, and such like, without his knowing of it. Many a capital metonymy have you produced in your day without ever dreaming of it.

Metonymies are not founded on resemblances, as similes and metaphors, the sisters, are; but on such intimate relations as those thirty-four which we shall now specify, each whereof is a figure. How many more they are! for each has its twin. The close study of this figure is fitted to give deep insight into the delicacy of language, that exhaustless marvel, and proof of man's God-birth. Variety is what calls attention; and sylph-like elegance.Nothing more etherial can be thought of.

I. A noun that expresses the cause is put for a noun that expresses the effect. In one of Goldsmith's poems, "The Deserted Village," is this:

"There was a time, ere England's griefs began,

When every rood of ground maintained its man."

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Ground," the cause, is put for the produce of the ground. Nobody uses the ground for food. "You write a bad hand," says teacher to pupil; "hand," the cause, being put for "writing." When Keats, in his rich “Lines to the Nightingale," cries, in his creamy, mellifluous style-

"O for a beaker full of the warm South!"

"South" stands for the wine mellowed there.

We obtain from his excellent poem, "Prince Adeb," this from George Henry Boker, where he uses "summer" for the flowers that are the effect and bloom of

summer:

"Mossy floors

Flower'd with the silken summer of Shiraz."

You say, "I have read Prescott and Thierry; I have read Froude, I have read Freeman:" you mean their noble histories, which the sooner you read the better. We have prescribed for you a very little of Edmund Spenser say ten lines a day. In the following are two fine metonymies, in "Old Decay" and in "Darkness;" which aid us much in detecting the source of the delight given us by this variety-the wide, dreamy vagueness that lies in the cause. It is the Cave of Mammon:

"Both roof and floor and walls were all of gold,
But overgrown with dust and Old Decay ;
And hid in darkness, that none could behold
The hue thereof, for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display.
But a faint shadow of uncertain light,
Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;

Or as the moon, clothed with cloudy night,

Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright."

Tennyson we turn to. Would he did not refine and polish quite so much, till the bow is becoming so much

ornamented away as to lose its rough and oaken strength. But here is a choice metonymy:

"And like a flower that can not all unfold,

So drenched it is with tempest."

Or a princess is seen

"Robed in the long night of her deep hair."

"Night," the cause of darkness, is put for darkness, the effect; "tempest" is put for rain. A feeling of vague width is on us: far larger than a single sharply defined effect. This half baffles, half pleases the mind, which roams forth untrammeled in a hazy dream-land peopled with wonders. Jeremy Taylor is rich in a usage akin to this, as when he tells us that—

"The rose began to put on darkness;"

or Spenser speaks of Una in her white innocence:

Through woods and wasteness wide him daily sought."

See her wandering, almost without hope of end, like the white and stainless moon, through limitless mists and far Sahara-stretches of midnight. Very choice, too, the following from Aaron Hill, both in expression and in sentiment:

"Hide not thy tears: weep boldly, and be proud
To give the flowing virtue manly way-

"Tis Nature's mark to know an honest heart by.
Shame on those breasts of stone that can not melt
In soft adoption of another's sorrow."

2. In a way precisely the converse of that just mentioned, the noun proper to the effect is used to express the cause. The Rev. James Harvey, author of " Meditations in a Flower Garden," remarkable for its florid