t
rapture" to a passage, the writer appearing to be actually almost left
behind by his own words. There is an example in Xenophon: "Clashing
their shields together they pushed, they fought, they slew, they
fell."[1] And the words of Eurylochus in the _Odyssey_--

"We passed at thy command the woodland's shade;
We found a stately hall built in a mountain glade."[2]

Words thus severed from one another without the intervention of stops
give a lively impression of one who through distress of mind at once
halts and hurries in his speech. And this is what Homer has expressed by
using the figure _Asyndeton_.

[Footnote 1: Xen. _Hel._ iv. 3. 19.]

[Footnote 2: _Od._ x. 251.]

XX

But nothing is so conducive to energy as a combination of different
figures, when two or three uniting their resources mutually contribute
to the vigour, the cogency, and the beauty of a speech. So Demosthenes
in his speech against Meidias repeats the same words and breaks up his
sentences in one lively descriptive passage: "He who receives a blow is
hurt in many ways which he could not even describe to another, by
gesture, by look, by tone."

2
Then, to vary the movement of his speech, and prevent it from standing
still (for stillness produces rest, but passion requires a certain
disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of the
soul), he at once dashes off in another direction, breaking up his words
again, and repeating them in a different form, "by gesture, by look, by
tone--when insult, when hatred, is added to violence, when he is struck
with the fist, when he is struck as a slave!" By such means the orator
imitates the action of Meidias, dealing blow upon blow on the minds of
his judges. Immediately after like a hurricane he makes a fresh attack:
"When he is struck with the fist, when he is struck in the face; this is
what moves, this is what maddens a man, unless he is inured to outrage;
no one could describe all this so as to bring home to his hearers its
bitterness."[1] You see how he preserves, by continual variation, the
intrinsic force of these repetitions and broken clauses, so that his
order seems irregular, and conversely his irregularity acquires a
certain measure of order.

[Footnote 1: _Meid._ 72.]

XXI

Supposing we add the conjunctions, after the practice of Isocrates and
his school: "Moreover, I must not omit to mention that he who strikes a
blow may hurt in many ways, in the fir