His word or two, and then comes night.

--Lowell.

+90. Personification.+--Personification is a special form of the metaphor
in which life is attributed to inanimate objects or the characteristics of
persons are attributed to objects, animals, or even to abstract ideas.

EXERCISES

Explain why the following quotations are examples of personifications:--

1. The day is done; and slowly from the scene
The stooping sun upgathers his spent shafts
And puts them back into his golden quiver.

--Longfellow.

2. Time is a cunning workman and no man can detect his joints.

--Charles Pierce Burton.

3. The sun is couched, the seafowl gone to rest,
And the wild storm hath somewhere found a nest.

--Wordsworth.

4. See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother.

--Shelley.

+91. Apostrophe.+--Apostrophe is like personification, but has an
additional characteristic. When we directly address inanimate objects or
the absent as if they were present, we call the figure of speech thus
formed apostrophe.

The following are examples of apostrophe:--

1. Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

--Tennyson.

2. Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for to-night!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore.

--Elizabeth Akers Allen.

+92. Metonymy.+--Metonymy consists in substituting one object for another,
the two being so closely associated that the mention of one suggests the
other.

1. The pupils are reading George Eliot.
2. Each hamlet heard the call.
3. Strike for your altars and your fires.
4. Gray hairs should be respected.

+93. Synecdoche.+--Synecdoche consists in substituting a part of anything
for the whole or a whole for the part.

1. A babe, two summers old.
2. Give us this day our daily bread.
3. Ring out the thousand years of woe,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
4. Fifty mast are on the ocean.

+94. Other Figures of Speech.+--Sometimes, especially in older rhetorics,
the following so-called figures of speech are added to the list already
given: irony, hyperbole, antithesis, climax, and interrogation. The two
former pertain rather to style, in fact, are qualities of style, while the
last two might properly be placed along with ki