5. There is no such thing as happiness in this world. The sole distinction is, that the life of a happy man is a picture, with a silver ground studded with stars of jet; while, on the other hand, the life of a miserable man is a dark ground with a few stars of silver.-NAPOLEON. METONY MY. $598. METONYMY, from Greek perwvvpia, a change of name, is a figure by which one word is put for another; as the cause for the effect, or the effect for the cause; the container for the contained; the sign for the thing signified. The relation is always that of causes, effects, or adjuncts. 1. Substituting the cause for the effect: A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man.-GOLDSMITH. 2. Substituting the effect for the cause : Can gray hairs make folly venerable?-JUNIUS. 3. Substituting the container for the contained: "The toper loves his bottle." The highwayman says, "Your purse or your life!" 4. Substituting the sign for the thing signified : "He carried away the palm." 5. Substituting the abstract for the concrete term: We wish that Labor may look up here, and be proud in the midst of its toil. We wish that Infancy may learn the purpose of its creation from maternal lips; and that weary and withered Age may behold and be solaced by the recollections which it suggests.-DANIEL WEBSTER. 6. There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To deck the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall a while repair To dwell a weeping hermit there.-COLLINS. PARABLE. § 599. PARABLE, Greek maрaboλn, from raрabáλλw, to compare, is an allegorical representation or relation of something real in life or nature, from which a moral is drawn. See the Parable of the Poor Man and his Lamb, 2 Sam., xii.; the Parable of the Ten Virgins, Matt., xxv. PARALEIPSIS. $600. PARALEIPSIS, Greek napáλapıç, omission, is a figure by which a speaker pretends to pass by what at the same time he really mentions. 1. "I might say many things of his liberality, kindness to his domestics, his command in the army, and moderation during his office in the province; but the honor of the state presents itself to my view, and, calling me to it, advises me to omit these lesser matters." 2. "I do not speak of my adversary's scandalous venality and rapacity; I take no notice of his brutal conduct; I do not speak of his treachery and malice." PARONOMASIA. ὄνομα, § 601. PARONOMASIA, from the Greek napá, near, and ovoμa, a name, is a pun or a play upon words, in which the same word is used in different senses, or words similar in sound are set in opposition to each other. 1. "Voltaire had a stupid fat friar at Ferney, who was useful to him, and who went by the name of Père Adam, Father Adam. A gentleman who was visiting there, happening to get a glimpse of this inmate, asked Voltaire if that was Father Adam. 'Yes,' replied Voltaire, 'that is Father Adam, but not the first of men." 2. "Mr. Curran, the late celebrated Irish advocate, was walking one day with a friend who was extremely punctilious in his conversation. Hearing a person near him say curosity instead of curiosity, he exclaimed, 'How that man murders the English language! Not so bad,' said Curran; he has only knocked an i out.' PROSOPOPEIA OR PERSONIFICATION. § 602. PROSOPOPEIA, from the Greek прóσопоν, a person, and TOLEW, I make, is a figure by which the absent are introduced as present, and by which inanimate objects and abstract ideas are represented as living. 1. O Winter! ruler of the inverted year, Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled; Xx 2 3. Thy breath congealed upon thy lips; thy cheeks But urged by storms along its slippery way: Ha! comest thou now so late to mock Of sun's rays tipp'd with death, has borne? Vile slave thy yellow dross I scorn! His was the spell o'er hearts That only acting lends, The youngest of the sister arts, Where all their beauty blends; For Poetry can ill express Full many a tone of thought sublime; And Painting, mute and motionless, Steals but one partial glance from time: And Sculpture to be dumb.-CAmpbell Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.~COLLINS. PROVER B. § 603. PROVERB, Latin proverbium, a short sentence, ex. pressing a well-known truth or common fact ascertained by experience or observation; a maxim of wisdom. "Out of sight out of mind." REPARTEE. § 604. REPARTEE, French repartie, a smart, witty reply. "Said a would-be agreeable, taking his seat between Madame de Staël and the reigning beauty of the day, 'How happy I am to be thus seated between a wit and a beauty.' 'Yes,' replied Madame de Staël, 'and without possessing either!'" SARCAS M. § 605. SARCASM, from the Greek σapraopos, from oаρkašw, to sneer at or deride, primarily to flay or pluck off the skin, is a keen, reproachful expression, uttered with scorn or contempt. It is sometimes bitter, biting irony. 1. My Lord,―The profound respect I bear to the gracious prince who governs this country with no less honor to himself than satisfaction to his subjects, and who restores you to your rank under his standard, will save you from a multitude of reproaches. The attentions I should have paid to your failings is involuntarily attracted to the hand that rewards them; and though I am not so partial to the royal judgment as to affirm that the king can remove mountains of infamy, it serves at least to lessen, for undoubtedly it divides the burden. While I remember how much is due to his sacred character, I can not, with any decent appearance of propriety, call you the meanest and basest fellow in the kingdom. I protest, my lord, I do not think so. You will have a dangerous rival in that kind of fame to which you have hitherto so happily directed your ambition, as long as there is one man living who thinks you worthy of his confidence, and fit to be trusted with any share in his government. I confess you have great intrinsic merit, but take care you do not value it too highly. Consider how much of it would have been lost to the world if the king had not graciously affixed his royal stamp and given it currency among his subjects. If it be true that a virtuous man struggling with adversity be a scene worthy of the gods, the glorious contest between you and the best of princes deserves a circle equally attentive and respectable. I think I see already other gods rising from beneath to behold it.-JUNIUS. 2. Sir Philip Francis, after his return to Parliament, 1784, gave great offense to Mr. Pitt by exclaiming, after he had pronounced an animated eulogy on Lord Chatham, "But he is dead, and has left nothing in this world that resembles him." SIMILE. § 606. SIMILE, from the Latin similis, like, is a comparison expressed in form, and is founded on resemblance. 1. The ship kept on away up the river, lessening and lessening in the waning sunshine like a little white cloud melting away in the summer sky.-W. IRVING. 2. "Like the Aurora Borealis of their native sky, the poets and historians of Iceland not only illuminated their own country, but flashed the light of their genius through the night which hung over the rest of Europe." 3. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I can not call it color; it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's Tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald! Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray wall of rocks into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset!-Modern Painters. 4. The poems of Byron are as the scenes of a summer evening, where all is tender, and grand, and beautiful; but the damps of disease descend with the dews of heaven, and the pestilent vapors of night are breathed in with the fragrance and the balm, and the delicate and the fair are the surest victims of the exposure.-Professor FRISBIE. |