Interrogatively –

In this God's world, with its wild whirling eddies and mad foam oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law and judgment for an unjust thing sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice?-Carlyle.

Emotionally, that is, in the form technically known as exclamatory

Hang it! how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!Lamb.

For the collocation of words, every language has its peculiar usage. If inflected, there is large scope for variety in the arrangement, since verbal relations are indicated by terminal syllables. If uninflected, like modern English, the relation of words is determined by the relation of thoughts, syntax is positional, and logical analysis precedes grammatical. Hence we find here a prescribed order, according to which the subject precedes the predicate, the object follows the verb, and modifying words are placed as near as practicable to the words modified. This syntactical and customary succession is observed so. long as it coincides with the usual order of thought. To express the latter suitably, however, the former is sometimes violated. Such a departure is called inversion. Whatever fixes the attention most strongly, or excites the passion of the speaker, will naturally seek utterance first. Thus we are told that the preaching of Paul at Ephesus produced a general uproar, in which the people cried without intermission, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' Observe that the translators would have destroyed the signature of impetuosity by adhering to the habitual order, which is the order of a cool and temperate mood.

Sentences, whether simple, complex, or compound, obviously fall into two great classes - long and short. The first gives gravity and dignity to composition, but requires careful handling and a high degree of elaboration, that

the clauses be properly arranged, and the leading subject be retained prominently before the mind. If too long or too frequent, the effect is to fatigue by the difficulty of perceiving clearly the connection of the several parts, and of taking in the whole at one view. The second, requiring less attention, and easier to understand, always suits a brisk and brilliant movement; but, wanting the cement of thought, the connections, the 'hooks-and-eyes of the memory,' they are not so easily remembered. 'Like idle morning visitors,' says Coleridge, 'the brisk and breathless periods hurry in and hurry off in quick and profitless succession; each indeed for the moment of its stay prevents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth; but all together they leave the mistress of the house (the soul, I mean) flat and exhausted, incapable of attending to her own concerns, and unfitted for the conversation of more rational guests.' The long sentence, full of additions or exceptions, clumsy and unwieldy, prevails in German literature; the short, in French. 'Kant,' says De Quincey, 'might naturally enough have written a book from beginning to end in one vast hyperbolical sentence.' But, 'A long, involved sentence could not be produced from French literature, though a sultan were to offer his daughter in marriage to the man who should find it.' Long sentences characterize the writings of Hooker, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Johnson, Gibbon, De Quincey; short ones, the essays of Bacon, the works of Addison, Lamb, Macaulay, Emerson. Some authors exhibit an equal proportion of both. The most pleasing effect, as a rule, calls for an intermixture of the two-the stately and the sprightly. The following are examples of each:

To

It is not hard to die. It is harder a thousand times to live. die is to be a man. To live is only to try to be one. To live is to see God through a glass darkly. To die is to see him face to face. To live is to be in the ore. To die is to be smelted and come out

pure gold. To live is to be in March and November. To die is to find midsummer where there is perfect harmony and perfect beauty. -Beecher.

Our immense extent of fertile territory opening an inexhaustible field for successful enterprise, thus assuring to industry a certain reward for its labors, and preserving the lands for centuries to come from the manifold evils of an overcrowded and consequently degraded population; our magnificent system of federated republics, carrying out and applying the principles of representative democracy to an extent never hoped or imagined in the boldest theories of the old speculative republican philosophers, the Harringtons, Sydneys, and Lockes of former times; the reaction of our political system upon our social and domestic concerns, bringing the influence of popular feeling and public opinion to bear upon all the affairs of life in a degree hitherto wholly unprecedented; the unconstrained range of freedom of opinion, of speech, and of the press, and the habitual and daring exercise of that liberty upon the highest subjects; the absence of all serious inequality of fortune and rank in the condition of our citizens; our divisions into innumerable religious sects, and the consequent co-existence, never before regarded as possible, of intense religious zeal with a degree of toleration in feeling and perfect equality of rights; our intimate connection with that elder world beyond the Atlantic, communicating to us, through the press and emigration, much of good and much of evil not our own; high science, refined art, and the best knowledge of old experience, as well as prejudices and luxuries, vices and crimes, such as could not have been expected to spring up in our soil for ages; all these, combined with numerous other peculiarities in the institutions, and in the moral, civil, and social condition of the American people, have given to our society, through all its relations, a character exclusively its own.-Choate.

I intrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables. If a melancholy thought is importunate, I give another glance at my Spencer. When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally; I like to lean my head against them.-Hunt.

Whether long or short, sentences may be further classified into periodic and loose. The criterion of the former is, that the parts remain suspended in the mind till the

1

whole is finished, when the meaning is flashed back from the end to the beginning; of the second, that the construction will yield a complete sense at some point before the close. It is the closeness of connection between conclusion and commencement that gives rise to the name period, which signifies circuit. Thus the opening sentence of Paradise Lost, if stopped at Heavenly Muse,' would be periodic; continued to 'rhyme,' it becomes loose, several pauses being possible without incomplete

ness:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heaven and earth

Rose out of chaos: or, if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.-Milton.

A loose sentence may often be made periodic, advantageously, either by transposition or by the use of particles:

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.—Revelation.

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.-Sir Thomas Browne.

We cannot live on our past reputation, any more than our frames can be sustained on the food of which we have partaken days ago.-McCosh.

Then come listless irresolutions and the inevitable reaction of despair, or else the firm resolve to record upon the leaves that still

remain a more noble history than the child's story with which the book began.-Longfellow.

I realize that each generation is destined to confront new and peculiar perils to wrestle with temptations and seductions unknown to its predecessors; yet I trust that progress is a general law of our being, and that the ills and woes of our future shall be less crushing than those of the bloody and hateful past.—Greeley. Periodic

'Fallen, fallen, is that great city Babylon.'

'Since nature is the art of God, all things are artificial.'

'We can no more live on our past reputation than we can be sustained on the food of which we have partaken days ago.'

"Then come either listless irresolutions and the inevitable reaction of despair, or the firm resolve to record upon the leaves that still remain a more noble history than the child's story with which the book began.'

'While I realize that each generation is destined to confront new and peculiar perils-to wrestle with temptations and seductions unknown to its predecessors, I trust not only that progress is a general law of our being, but that the ills and woes of our future shall be less crushing than those of the bloody and hateful past.'

On comparing the two kinds of structure, periodic and loose, we find that each has its advantages and disadvantages. The former savours more of artifice and design, the latter seems more the result of pure Nature. The period is nevertheless more susceptible of vivacity and force; the loose sentence is apt, as it were, to languish and grow tiresome. The first is more adapted to the style of the writer; the second, to that of the speaker. But as that style is best, whether written or spoken, which hath a proper mixture of both, so there are some things in every species of discourse which require a looser, and some which require a preciser, manner. In general, the use of periods best suits the dignity of the historian, the political writer, and the philosopher. The other man