Ephors

“ It is not pleasant to be shut up in prison for a fortnight, expecting every day that poison, or a dagger, will make that one your last. But even to that the prisoner gets accustomed in time, and the danger of assassination begins, at last, to lend some excitement to life, spent in the horrible monotony of such a situation. Alkibiades was not afraid of death. His determined resistance to it when it had been openly decreed against him by the Athenians, and secretly by king Agis and the Ephors at Sparta, was caused as much by the sense of the injustice of it as from any fear of death itself. ”

“ IV. While the Spartans were waging their great war against the Athenians (432-404 B.C.) and afterwards when they were enjoying the advantages which their success procured for them, many alterations were gradually introduced in their customs and government. Helots were emancipated for service as soldiers: inequalities arose among the Spartiatæ, some of them acquiring great fortunes as regulators (harmosts) in foreign cities, others sinking to poverty and losing their civic rights: and the Ephors used their time of office for the getting of wealth and enjoyment of luxury. ”

“ They say to you, oh Poet, ‘Perfect those gifts of your higher nature—yet be not of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.’ Look upon every beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression. ”

“ I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body; and we measure the inspiration by the music. In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but in poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the expression mounts. ”

“ The 'truth embodied in a tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which 'every knee shall bow,' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling than the realisation of its meaning. ”

“ On the other hand, among a hundred ways of saying a thing, there are more than ninety that a care for euphony may reasonably forbid. All who have consciously practised the art of writing know what endless and painful vigilance is needed for the avoidance of the unfit or untuneful phrase, how the meaning must be tossed from expression to expression, mutilated and deceived, ere it can find rest in words. ”

“ The language of the ancient orator concerning his art may be applied to life, that not only its greatness, but its enjoyment, consists in action—action—ACTION. The feelings, for instance, may become so morbidly sensitive, as to give an appearance of weakness to the whole character ”

“ I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs matter, custom, and all but itself. ”

“ Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. "The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible." ”

“ In its lofty and impassioned forms oratory attains to eloquence,—that quality which profoundly moves the hearts and wills of the hearers.
But it is well to recognize the source of eloquence, which is to be distinguished from bombast and fustian. Eloquence is not a trick of rhetoric; it springs from the moral character of the speaker, from his gifts and attainments, and from the subject and occasion. ”

“ Let some sudden emotion fill his soul, and he will rise again, not in the mist this time, but in the rays of the sun; he will soar aloft, and we will wonder at the grandeur of his eloquence. Whatever be his subject, he will coin a word, or distort a meaning, or cram into an idiom more meaning than grammar, custom, or dictionary allow, rather than leave a gap between word and thought ”

“ Eloquence is, I have sometimes thought, the rarest quality that may be embraced in the essentials of style. We need not quibble over definitions. “Eloquence,” said Dean Farrar, “is the noble, the harmonious, the passionate expression of truths profoundly realized, or of emotions intensely felt”; and it is sufficient for our purposes. The term is applied commonly and uncritically in oratory. I have not myself found the reading of the speeches of great orators profitable, charmed they never so marvelously in their own day. ”

“ O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. ”

“ I have attempted to symbol the course of a Poet's mind from a state wherein thought is disordered, barren and uncultivated, to that which is ordered and swayed by the true Spirit of Poetry, and holds its perfect creed. ”

“ He collects his phrases in harmonious periods, and does not neglect the delight of the ears any more than of the mind. By his inversions he adds force to his ideas, and weight to his argument. He selects elegant or noble terms, rejects idle words and redundant phrases. Every epithet contains an idea, every metaphor a sentiment. ”

“ One single simple incident, a pleasantly naïve or even silly word, a blunder, a paradox, a clever remark, personal singularities or habits, nay, a peculiar expression, and whatever else would occur in a gay and bustling life—took the form of a dialogue, a catechism, a passing scene, or a drama,—often in prose, but oftener in verse. ”

“ His phraseology rolls ever in solemn and majestic periods, in which every substantive marches ceremoniously accompanied by its epithet; grand pompous words peal like an organ; every proposition is set forth balanced by a proposition of equal length; thought is developed with the compressed regularity and official splendour of a procession. ”

“ Canst thou copy in verse one chime Of the wood-bell's peal and cry, Write in a book the morning's prime, Or match with words that tender sky? Wonderful verse of the gods, Of one import, of varied tone; They chant the bliss of their abodes To man imprisoned in his own. Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man's ear Seldom in this low life's round Are unsealed that he may hear. ”

“ Poets, too, and orators in their loftiest moods revert to language and modes of expression which have no meaning apart from this belief in the conscious animation of every object in the world. They may move us for the moment by their utterances ”

“ As for eloquence, which Eloquence, rhetoric, etc.also was classed with poetry by our ancestors, and which is subjective and passionate, I do not say that it may not rise by borrowing wings; but in a poem the force of eloquence pure and simple cannot be prolonged without lessening ideality and the subtlest quality of all,—suggestiveness,—and rhetoric is as false a note as didacticism in the poet's fantasia. ”

“ No poetry comes by the elevation of prose; but the half of prose comes by the “massing into the common clay” of thousands of winged words, whence, like the lovely shells of by-gone ages, one is occasionally disinterred by some lover of speech, and held up to the light to show the play of colour in its manifold laminations. ”

“ One must be capable of reacting to stimuli for a moment, as a real, live person, even in face of as much of one's own powers as are arrayed against one;... The virile complaint, the revolt of the poet, all which shows his emotion,—that is poetry. ”

“ It so happened that the circumstances of the time supplied to him in perfection the conditions essential for the exercise of this colossal wit, grand and grave solemnities, where it was his accepted part to find language for truths or, to speak more modestly and humanly, for a part of truth, which there and then was admissible only under reserve. To overcome difficulties of expression, to put a thought better and more effectively than your hearers could expect in the given conditions, is the essence of wit. ”

“ At the same time this very imperfection of speech, and the struggle of primitive thought to express itself in language sometimes creates, as it were by accident, the very flower of strength and vividness in picturesque description, and the interpretation of emotion as the most skillful art has been unable to do. ”

“ All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself ”

“ For, in poetry, some emotional response to the object meant by the word impels to its utterance, and this is embodied in it when it is uttered, and a similar feeling is awakened in the auditor when it is heard or read. A word not only mirrors a situation through its meaning, but preserves something of the mind's response; it communicates the total experience,—the self as well as the object. Finally, the meaning of a word may not remain a mere idea, but may grow out into one or more of the concrete images of which it is the residuum. ”

“ It is the tone of voice in which a thought is uttered that gives the thought its power for good or evil, for pleasure or for pain, for success or failure. Words spoken in one manner will be devoid of meaning; spoken in another, they will be illumined with the light of reason. Words that are spoken as words will remain nothing but words, but those that are spoken as thoughts will disappear as words, and the ideas will step forward and be seen in the expressive countenance and heard in the tones of the voice. ”

“ As a fine example of poetical expression, the discourse obviously has its own intrinsic value. The author's power to sketch with a few bold strokes the magical effect of a disquieting rumour; the vivid force with which he realizes the possibilities of ravage and ruin which are wrapped up in those vague, uncertain tidings; the pathos and passion of his lament over his stricken country, stricken as yet to his perception only; the tenderness of feeling; the subtle sweetness of language; the variety of metaphor ”

“ He possessed it as every one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charméd for charm’d, and thousands of others. ”

“ The further our literary inquiries are extended here, the more vast and stupendous is the scene which opens to us; at the same time, that the true and false, the sublime and the puerile, wisdom and absurdity, are so intermixed, that, at every step, we have to smile at folly, while we admire and acknowledge the philosophical truth, though couched in obscure allegory and puerile fable. ”

“ Your Lordship must form Your Judgment upon the best Models, and the most celebrated Pens, where you will find the Metaphor in all its Grace and Strength, shedding a Lustre and Beauty on the Work. For it ought never to be used, but when it giveth greater Force to the Sentence, an Illustration to the Thought, and insinuateth a silent Argument in the Allusion. The Use of Metaphors is not only to convey the Thought in a more pleasing Manner, but to give it a stronger lmpression, and enforce it on the Mind. ”

“ Beasts fight with horns, and men, when the guns are silent, with words. The changes of meaning in words from good to bad and from bad to good senses, which are quite independent of their root meaning, is proof enough, without detailed illustration, of the incessant nature of the strife. The question is not what a word means, but what it imputes." [Footnote: Raleigh's Wordsworth. London, 1903.]
Now if the quiet and accurate statement of things as they are is the ideal language of prose, it is obvious that the characteristic diction of poetry is unquiet, inaccurate, incurably emotional. ”

“ This effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned poetry; while in lighter compositions the ease and gracefulness with which the Poet manages his numbers are themselves confessedly a principal source of the gratification of the Reader. I might perhaps include all which it is necessary to say upon this subject by affirming what few persons will deny, that of two descriptions either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once. ”

“ Now, when we say that argument must move its reader, we begin to pass from the realm of pure thought, in which exposition takes rise, to that of feeling, for feeling is a necessary preliminary to action. ”

“ The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. ”