spectators, and players into one excited, ecstatic whole--just as you have found

yourself starting forward in your seat at the delivery of the ball with "three

on and two down" in the ninth inning. Notice, too, how--perhaps

unconsciously--Talmage painted the scene in Homer's characteristic style: not as

having already happened, but as happening before your eyes.

 

If you have attended many travel talks you must have been impressed by the

painful extremes to which the lecturers go--with a few notable exceptions, their

language is either over-ornate or crude. If you would learn the power of words

to make scenery, yes, even houses, palpitate with poetry and human appeal, read

Lafcadio Hearn, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, and Edmondo De Amicis.

 

Blue-distant, a mountain of carven stone appeared before them,--the Temple,

lifting to heaven its wilderness of chiseled pinnacles, flinging to the sky the

golden spray of its decoration.

 

--LAFCADIO HEARN, _Chinese Ghosts_.

 

The stars were clear, colored, and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery

vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around me the black fir-points stood upright

and stock-still. By the whiteness of the pack-saddle I could see Modestine

walking round and round at the length of her tether; I could hear her steadily

munching at the sward; but there was not another sound save the indescribable

quiet talk of the runnel over the stones.