Exercise 80 IN THE HOUSE OF USHER1 BY EDGAR ALLAN POE The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, of the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed! to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmos phere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. HELPS TO STUDY: Compare this description of a room with that in Indoors on a Rainy Day; also with other descriptions of rooms, which may be found in almost any novel. In what order are the objects in the room described? Do you find the same order in other descriptions of the sort? What general impression is produced? How does this affect the choice of objects to be described, so far as you can tell? Find some other description of a room which produces a different impression. Is there anything in the present paragraph that suggests what sort of people the Ushers are? Read the story, and learn whether your guess is right. Exercise 81 OUR APPROACH TO NEVIS 2 BY LAFCADIO HEARN Southward, above and beyond the deep green chain, tower other volcanic forms, very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like clouds. Those are the heights of Nevis, -another creation of the subterranean fires. 1 From the Fall of the House of Usher. 2 From A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics, 30-31. It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great mountain flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest, with clouds packed high upon it, still seems to smoke; the second highest displays the most symmetrical crater-form I have yet seen. All are still grayish-blue or gray. Gradually through the blues break long high gleams of green. As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky; the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red, and brown; houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are distinguishable; cane plantations unfold gold-green surfaces. We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to become a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it continues green; but it is a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor. The sea to-day looks almost black: the southwest wind has filled the day with luminous mist; and the phantom of Nevis melts in the vast glow, dissolves utterly.1 Boo-00-00-0om, boo-woo-woo-oom-oom-ow-owm, yarr-yarr! The whirling cylinder boomed, roared, and snarled as it rose in speed. At last, when its tone became a rattling yell, David nodded to the pitchers, rasped his hands together, the sheaves began to fall from the stack, the band-cutter, knife in hand, slashed the bands in twain, and the feeder, with easy majestic motion, gathered them under his arm, rolled them out into an even belt of entering wheat, on which the cylinder tore with its frightful, ferocious snarl. Will was very happy in his quiet way. He enjoyed the smooth roll of his great muscles, the sense of power he felt in his hands as he lifted, turned, and swung the heavy sheaves two by two down upon 1 For help in studying this selection, and the selections following, see the Helps to Study in Exercises 78-80. 2 From Main Travelled Roads. 8 Ibid. the table, where the band-cutter madly slashed away. His frame, sturdy rather than tall, was nevertheless lithe, and he made a fine figure to look at, so Agnes thought, as she came out a moment and bowed and smiled to both the young men. This scene, one of the jolliest and most sociable of the Western farm, had a charm quite aside from human companionship. The beautiful yellow straw entering the cylinder; the clear yellow-brown wheat pulsing out at the side; the broken straw, chaff, and dust puffing out on the great stacker; the cheery whistling and calling of the driver; the keen, crisp air, and the bright sun somehow weirdly suggestive of the passage of time. II Leaving Rob to sputter over his cooking, Seagraves took his slow way off down toward the oxen grazing in a little hollow. The scene was characteristically, wonderfully beautiful. It was about five o'clock in a day in late June, and the level plain was green and yellow, and infinite in reach as a sea; the lowering sun was casting over its distant swells a faint impalpable mist, through which the breaking teams on the neighboring claims ploughed noiselessly, as figures in a dream. The whistle of gophers, the faint, wailing, fluttering cry of the falling plover, the whir of the swift-winged prairie-pigeon, or the quack of a lonely duck, came through the shimmering air. The lark's infrequent whistle, piercingly sweet, broke from the longer grass in the swales near by. No other climate, sky, plain, could produce the same unnamable weird charm. No tree to wave, no grass to rustle; scarcely a sound of domestic life; only the faint melancholy soughing of the wind in the short grass, and the voices of the wild things of the prairie. Seagraves, an impressionable young man (junior editor of the Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat-rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boomtown's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving here and there across the sod, with a peculiar noiseless, effortless motion that made them seem as calm, lazy, and unsubstantial as the mist through which they made their way; even the sound of passing wagons was a sort of low, well-fed, self-satisfied chuckle. Seagraves, "holding down a claim near Rob, had come to see his neighboring "bach" because feeling the need of company; but, now that he was near enough to hear him prancing about getting supper, he was content to lie alone on a slope of the green sod. The silence of the prairie at night was well-nigh terrible. Many a night, as Seagraves lay in his bunk against the side of his cabin, he would strain his ear to hear the slightest sound, and be listening thus sometimes for minutes before the squeak of a mouse or the step of a passing fox came as a relief to the aching sense. In the daytime, however, and especially on a morning, the prairie was another thing. The pigeons, the larks, the cranes, the multitudinous voices of the ground-birds and snipes and insects, made the air pulsate with sound a chorus that died away into an infinite murmur of music. "Hello, Seagraves!" yelled Rob from the door. "The biscuit are 'most done." Seagraves did not speak, only nodded his head, and slowly rose. The faint clouds in the west were getting a superb flame-color above and a misty purple below, and the sun had shot them with lances of yellow light. As the air grew denser with moisture, the sounds of neighboring life began to reach the ear. Children screamed and laughed, and afar off a woman was singing a lullaby. The rattle of wagons and voices of men speaking to their teams multiplied. Ducks in a neighboring lowland were quacking. The whole scene took hold upon Seagraves with irresistible power.1 1 For other specimens of description, not all of which are examples of pure description, see The Snow-Storm (Exercise 14), Ichabod on Horseback (Section 13), The Wreck (Exercise 29; study the epithets), The Bay of Monterey (Section 18; illustrates plan and comparison in description), Smokeless Powder in Battle (Exercise 32), At the Trial of Warren Hastings (Exercise 46), The Knight of the Red Crosse (Exercise 50); see further Exercise 23 (last selection; narration and description blended), Section 25 ("The solitary mountain-side," etc.; note the emphasis laid on the single detail, laughter), Section 46 (“Venerable Men !" etc.), and the situations in the narrative selections in this book. SECTION 69 The Nature of Description The nature of description, the least independent of the four kinds of writing, ought now to be fairly well understood. From what was said about description in Section 59 and at the beginning of Part III, and from your study of the selections at the beginning of this chapter, you have learned that description, like narration, deals mainly with the outer world of persons and things, and that description, unlike narration, has to do mainly with the appearance of persons and things, the purpose of all description being to tell how persons and things look. You have learned also that the details in the most effective description are brought in in the order in which they would most likely be seen. This last fact, as we shall soon see, is of the utmost importance in the work of description, and will be fully explained in the next section. -- But there are really two sorts of description. By one sort of description you convey information to the reader about some person or thing, and by the other sort you try to give your impression of the appearance of some person or thing in such a way as to produce in the mind of the reader an image more or less like your own. The two sorts of description are easily illustrated. An example of the first sort is the following description, given out by detectives, of an escaped bank defaulter : 1 Pieces of pure description are hard to find. Most description is accessory to narration or explanation, and is therefore commonly brief and fragmentary. |