iration of
the dark violet billows with their white edges down below;
nor of those graceful, fan-like jets of silver upon the
rocks, which slowly rise aloft like water spirits from the
deep, then shiver, and break, and spread, and shroud
themselves, and disappear in a soft mist of foam; nor of the
gentle, incessant heaving and panting of the whole liquid
plain; nor of the long waves, keeping steady time, like a
line of soldiery as they resound upon the hollow shore,--he
would not deign to notice the restless living element at all
except to bless his stars that he was not upon it. Nor the
distinct details, nor the refined coloring, nor the graceful
outline and roseate golden hue of the jutting crags, nor the
bold shadows cast from Otus or Laurium by the declining
sun;--our agent of a mercantile firm would not value these
matters even at a low figure. Rather, we must turn for the
sympathy we seek to yon pilgrim student, come from a
semi-barbarous land to that small corner of the earth, as to
a shrine, where he might take his fill of gazing on those
emblems and coruscations of invisible unoriginate
perfection. It was the stranger from a remote province, from
Britain or from Mauritania, who in a scene so different from
that of his chilly, woody swamps, or of his fiery, choking
sands, learned at once what a real University must be, by
coming to understand the sort of country which was its
suitable home."[6]

Enumerative Description.

Enumerative description has one point of great difference from
suggestive description. In the former everything is told; in the
latter the description is as fortunate in what it omits as in what it
includes. Were an architect to give specifications for the building of
a house, every detail would have to be included; but after all the
pages of careful enumeration the reader would know less of how it
looked than after these few words from Irving. "A large, rickety
wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of
them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door
was painted 'The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.'" So the manual
training student uses five hundred words to describe in detail a box
which would be thrown off with but a few words in a piece of
literature. In enumerative description, one element is of as much
impo