and look green in song.

--ALEXANDER POPE, _Windsor Forest_.

The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar
facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it
clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he
watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a
material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind,
contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment
of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the
blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It
is proper creation.

--RALPH WALDO EMERSON, _Nature_.

Like other valuable resources in public speaking, description loses its
power when carried to an extreme. Over-ornamentation makes the subject
ridiculous. A dust-cloth is a very useful thing, but why embroider it?
Whether description shall be restrained within its proper and important
limits, or be encouraged to run riot, is the personal choice that comes
before every speaker, for man's earliest literary tendency is to depict.

_The Nature of Description_

To describe is to call up a picture in the mind of the hearer. "In
talking of description we naturally speak of portraying, delineating,
coloring, and all the devices of the picture painter. To describe is to
visualize, hence we must look at description as a pictorial process,
whether the writer deals with material or with spiritual objects."[19]

If you were asked to describe the rapid-fire gun you might go about it
in either of two ways: give a cold technical account of its mechanism,
in whole and in detail, or else describe it as a terrible engine of
slaughter, dwelling upon its effects rather than upon its structure.

The former of these processes is exposition, the latter is true
description. Exposition deals more with the _general_, while description
must deal with the _particular_. Exposition elucidates _ideas_,
description treats of _things_. Exposition deals with the _abstract_,
description with the _concrete_. Exposition is concerned with the
_internal_, description with the _external_. Exposition is
_enumerative_, description _literary_. Exposition is _intellectual_,
description _sensory_. Exposition is _impersonal_, description
_personal_.

If description is a visualizing process for the hearer, it is first of
all such for the speaker--he cannot describe what he has never seen,
either physically or in fa