ations,
implications, and general emotional coloring--lies their power to clothe
thought with the rich color of feeling which is the life. At the same
time, they serve as a fillip to the attention. There are not very many
people who can long keep the mind fixed on a purely abstract line of
thought, and none can do it without some effort. Professor William James
is a notable example of a writer whose thought flowed spontaneously into
necessary figures of speech:

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences,
and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
and postponement, what choking down of preference, what
submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very
stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast
augustness,--then how besotted and contemptible seems every
little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths,
and pretending to decide things out of his private dream.[63]

One cannot go to sleep over a style like that, for besides the
obvious sincerity and rush of warm feeling, the vividness of
the figures is like that of poetry. On the either hand, one
must remember that it is given to few men to attain the
unstudied eloquence of Professor James.

Fables and anecdotes serve much the same purpose, but
more especially throw into memorable form the principle
which they are intended to set forth. There are a good many
truths which are either so complex or so subtle that they defy
phrasing in compact form, yet their truth we all know by intuition.
If for such a truth you can find a compact illustration,
you can leave it much more firmly fixed in your readers' minds
than by any amount of systematic exposition. Lincoln in his
Springfield speech, for example, threw into striking form the
feeling which was so common in the North, that each step
forward in the advance of slavery so fitted into all earlier ones
that something like a concerted plan must be assumed:

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are, the
result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different
portions of which we know have been gotten cut at different times and
places and by different workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James,
for instance,--and we see these timbers joined together, and see they
exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the teno