re has said it." More often, however, the function
of the figurative is to drive home a thought or a mood of which a mere
statement would leave us unmoved--to make us _feel_ it. Thus Burke
said of the Americans "Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and
attached on this specific point of taxing." He added: "Here they felt its
pulse, and as they found that beat they thought themselves sick or sound."
Had you been one of his Parliamentary hearers, would not that second
sentence have made more real and more important the colonial attitude to
taxation? The poets of course make frequent and noble use of the
figurative. This is how Coleridge tells us that the descent of a tropical
night is sudden:

"The sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark."

The words _rush out_ and _at one stride comes_ convert the stars
and the darkness into vast beings or at least vast personal forces; the
comparisons are so natural as to seem inevitable; we are transported to
the very scene and feel the overwhelming abruptness of the nightfall. But
if a figure of speech seems artificial, if it is strained or far-fetched
or merely decorative, it subtracts from the effectiveness of the passage.
Thus when Tennyson says:

"When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy."

we must stop and ponder before we perceive that what he means is "When I
was a happy child." The figure is like an exotic plant rather than a
natural outgrowth of the soil; it appears to us something thought up and
stuck on; it is a parasite rather than a helper.

Of course, as with abstraction and concreteness, you should develop
facility in gliding from literalness to figurativeness and back again. But
you are always to remember that your gymnastics are not to militate
against verbal concord. You must never set words scowling and growling at
each other through injudicious combinations like this: "She was five feet,
four and three-quarter inches high, had a small, round scar between her
nose and her left cheek-bone, and moved with the lissom and radiant grace
of a queen."

EXERCISE - Literal

1. Give the specifications for a house you intend to build.

2. Make a list of comparisons (as to a nest, a haven, a goal) to show what
such a house might mean in the life of a man. Expand as many of these
comparisons as you can, but do not carry the process to absurd lengths.
(In the figure of the nest you may mention the p