thinking out the comparison, remembering as he did the very apt one already made by General Sherman :

THE BAY OF MONTEREY

The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the Salinas River is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In front of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends north and northwest, and then westward to enclose the bay. STEVENSON, Across the Plains.

Though there are no two things in the world that are precisely alike,1 there are innumerable objects that are alike in certain particulars or under certain circumstances. These likenesses, with their accompanying unlikenesses, it is the business of education to enable us to detect. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that that man has the most liberal education who can detect for himself the greatest number of these resemblances and differences, and that that man has the mightiest power who can most effectively give expression to them, whatever form that expression may take. The first is he who sees most clearly what things really are, and the second is he who makes the best use of what he sees. In the writing you will have to do, it will be helpful to bear in mind at least four cautions: first, the likeness you point out should be a real likeness, and not a fanciful one; second, it should go to the heart

1 See Section 5; also G. T. Ladd, Primer of Psychology, chap. xiii, especially the opening paragraph.

of the things compared; third, the thing to which you compare another thing should be familiar to your readers; and fourth, the comparison should not be worked out in wearisome detail when a comparison has served its purpose, which is primarily to make clear something that is not clear, it has done all it is well capable of doing.

SECTION 19

Construction of Paragraphs

4. BY TELLING WHAT A THING IS NOT LIKE: CONTRAST

Comparison, strictly interpreted, includes contrast as well as comparison proper, that is, it has to do not only with the likenesses of things, but with their unlikenesses as well. Some comparison, either expressed or implied, must always precede or accompany contrast, if for nothing more than to show that the things compared are different. Here, however, it seems best to speak of the two methods separately. It frequently happens that you can best get to the heart of a matter by telling what a thing is not like, or what is pretty much the same thing, by telling in what respect things are not alike.

Mr. Matthews contrasts Franklin and Emerson in the following paragraphs: —

FRANKLIN AND EMERSON

Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston almost a century before Ralph Waldo Emerson was born there, lived long enough to see the strag gling colonies with their scant four hundred thousand settlers grow into a vigorous young nation of four million inhabitants. Emerson, born only thirteen years after Franklin's death, lived long enough to see the United States increase to thirty-eight, and a population of five and a half millions expand to a population of fifty millions. He

survived to behold a little nation grow to be a mighty people, able to fight a righteous war without flinching.

Different as they are, Franklin and Emerson are both typical Americans taken together they give us the two sides of the American character. Franklin stands for the real, and Emerson for the ideal. Franklin represents the prose of American life, and Emerson the poetry. Franklin's power is limited by the bounds of common sense, while Emerson's appeal is to the wider imagination. Where Emerson advises you to "hitch your wagon to a star," Franklin is ready with an improved axle-grease for the wheels. Franklin declares that honesty is the best policy; and Emerson insists on honesty as the only means whereby a man may be free to undertake higher things. Self-reliance was at the core of the doctrine of each of them, but one urged self-help in the material world and the other in the spiritual. Hopeful they were, both of them, and kindly, and shrewd; and in the making of the American people, in the training and in the guidance of this immense population, no two men have done more than these two sons of New England. — Brander MaTTHEWS, An Introduction to the Study of American Literature, chap. viii.

Exercise 32

Point out comparisons and contrasts in the following selections. Note here and elsewhere the use of words and phrases like "but," "however," "yet," "still," "nevertheless," "notwithstanding," "on the other hand,” “on the contrary," and so on, which are frequently employed in drawing contrasts. Note the position they occupy in the sentence in which they stand, use the dictionary to distinguish between them as to meaning and strength, and make use of such of them as you can in your own contrast work:

SMOKELESS POWDER IN BATTLE

The use of smokeless powder in battle takes off about all that is left of romance and poetry in battle. It is like a play without scenery. It is the actors unmasked and half dressed and all that in

the dirty green room. The smoke of cannon in the old days lay along the grass for hundreds of feet after the shot had passed, and then it began slowly to rise up as if alive. Then it would thicken and drift slowly about and wait a reënforcement of smoke till the whole earth was gray and white and black with battle smoke. Only a few successive volleys from artillery and the curtain fell on the scene to rise no more on that act.

Now, boom! bang! rip! rattle! tear! Often three or four or five together or so close together that you can't say whether three or five or ten, and then it is a sort of ripping sound as if the air were being torn in two, crosswise and lengthwise at once. But the volume of sound does not seem greater by this added number of shots. Maybe a single big field-piece is the full capacity of the human ear. You begin to like it after a while, and you really feel half vexed when there comes a slacking off, as then the sound ceases, of course; and when the great guns stop entirely, as they must, and the rattle of small arms only is heard, you feel like hissing the actors off the stage. —JOAQUIN MILLER (Cincinnatus Heine Miller), The Examiner (San Francisco), Sept. 30, 1900.

THE LAMP OF REALITY 1

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature. There was a popular writer of romances, who, it was said, used to go round to the fashionable watering-places to pick up characters. That was better than nothing. There is another popular writer who, it seems, makes voluminous indices of men and things, and draws on them for his material. This also is better than nothing. For some writers, and writers dear to the circulating libraries too, might, for all that appears in their works, lie in bed all day, and write by night under the excitement of green tea. Creative art, I suppose

1 "Ruskin has lighted seven lamps of Architecture to guide the steps of the architect in the worthy practice of his art. It seems time that lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction. Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels; and then look into the novels which they read! . . . If seven lamps have been lighted for Architecture, Scott will light as many for Fiction" (from the preceding paragraph).

they call this, and it is creative with a vengeance. Not so, Scott. The human nature which he paints, he has seen in all its phases, gentle and simple, in burgher and shepherd, Highlander, Lowlander, Borderer, and Islesman; he had come into close contact with it; he had opened it to himself by the talisman of his joyous and winning presence; he had studied it thoroughly with a clear eye and an allembracing heart. When his scenes are laid in the past, he has honestly studied history. The history of his novels is perhaps not critically accurate, not up to the mark of our present knowledge, but in the main it is sound and true - sounder and more true than that of many professed historians, and even than that of his own historical works, in which he sometimes yields to prejudice, while in his novels he is lifted above it by his loyalty to his art.-GOLDWIN SMITH, The Lamps of Fiction.1

AN EXPERIMENT IN BLOOD

i,

A slight prick of the finger with a cambric-needle supplies a point, not a drop, of blood, which we spread on a slip of glass, cover with another much thinner piece of glass, and look at in the microscope. You see a vast number of flattened disks rolling round in a clear fluid, or piled in columns like rouleaux of coin. Each of these is about onefiftieth of the diameter of the dot over this or the period at the end of this sentence, as it will be seen in fine print. You have many millions of millions of them circulating in your body, I am almost afraid to say how many by calculation. Here and there is a pearly looking globule, a little larger than one of the disks. These are the red and the white blood corpuscles, which are carried along by the pale fluid to which the red ones give its color, as the grains of sand are whirled along with a rapid torrent. The blood, then, you see, is not like red ink, but more like water with red and white currants, one of the latter to some hundreds of the former, floating in it, not dissolved in it. HOLMES, The Human Body and its Management.

THE GAME OF EDUCATION

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or 1 Note how the contrasting points are here gathered into two groups; in the paragraphs by Mr. Matthews (Section 19) they are made to alternate.