we shall call this the method of reversion. Every coin has an obverse and a reverse side, a face and a back. Reversion, to keep the figure, is the turning of the coin over in a way to bring its reverse side, or back, into full view. It is a way of saying that this side is not that side, that this thing is not that thing. As nearly every notion has as its opposite some other notion, ness, white is not black, sound is not not pain, life is not death, and so on, be effectively used at times to add both clearness and force to a paragraph. light is not darksilence, pleasure is this method may Burke has used this method in the first part of the following paragraph. After stating that his proposition is peace, he is referring to the resolutions he is about to move for conciliation with the American colonies, he goes on to make clear just the sort of peace it is, by telling the sort of peace it is not : [Subject-sentence.] The proposition is peace. [Reversion.] Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord fomented from principle in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking of the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. [Restatement; see Section 21.] It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose, by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country,1 to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the same act and by the same bond of the very same interest which reconciles them to British government. - BURKE, Speech on Conciliation with America. 1 The italics are Burke's. Exercise 30 Explain how reversion is used in the following paragraphs. The way to study these paragraphs is to ask yourself first, "What is the subject-sentence of this paragraph?" Having found the subject-sentence, ask yourself regarding every other sentence in the paragraph, “Is reversion used in any part of this sentence?" You will find that few paragraphs are constructed by any one method, and in the paragraphs that follow, other methods, besides that of reversion, will be found to have been used in building them up : THE IDEAL STATE We will try to make some small piece of English ground beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam-engines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons: no equality upon it; but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour in the risk of our lives; when we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, or in boats; we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields, - and few bricks. We will have some music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance to it, and sing it; perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also. We will have some art, moreover; we will at least try if, like the Greeks, we can't make some pots. RUSKIN, Fors Clavigera, letter v. PICTORIAL COMPOSITION Pictorial composition may be defined as the proportionate arranging and unifying of the different features and objects of a picture. It is not the huddling together of miscellaneous studio properties — a dummy, a vase, a rug here, and a sofa, a fireplace, a table there; it is not the lugging in by the ears of unimportant people to fill up the background of the canvas, as in the spectacular play; it is not taking a real group from nature and transplanting it upon canvas. There must be exercise of judgment on the part of the artist as to fitness and position, as to harmony of relation, proportion, color, light; and there must be a skilful uniting of all the parts into one perfect whole.-J. C. VAN DYKE, How to Judge of a Picture, 95. ON ENTERING THE WOOD Once within it, it was as though the sun had suddenly sunk from the heavens. The pines, of magnificent height and girth, were so closely set that far overhead, where the branches began, was a heavy roof of foliage, impervious to the sunshine, brooding, dark and sullen as a thundercloud, over the cavernous world beneath. There was no undergrowth, no clinging vines, no bloom, no color; only the dark, innumerable tree trunks and the purplish-brown, scented, and slippery earth. The air was heavy, cold, and still, like cave air; the silence as blank and awful as the silence beneath the earth. - MARY JOHNSTON, To Have and to Hold, chap. xv. THE CONDITION AND CHARACTER OF THE COLONISTS We learn from the results of this experiment, how fortunate was our own condition, and how admirably the character of our people was calculated for setting the great example of popular governments. The possession of power did not turn the heads of the American people, for they had long been in the habit of exercising a great degree of self-control. Although the paramount authority of the parent state existed over them, yet a large field of legislation had always been open to our Colonial assemblies. They were accustomed to representative bodies and the forms of free government; they understood the doctrine of the division of power among different branches, and the necessity of checks on each. The character of our countrymen, moreover, was sober, moral, and religious; and there was little in the change to shock their feelings of justice and humanity, or even to disturb an honest prejudice. We had no domestic throne to overturn, no privileged orders to cast down, no violent changes of property to encounter. In the American Revolution, no man sought or wished for more than to defend and enjoy his own. None hoped for plunder or for spoil. Rapacity was unknown to it; the axe was not among the instruments of its accomplishment; and we all know that it could not have lived a single day under any well-founded imputation of possessing a tendency adverse to the Christian religion. - WEBSTER, The Bunker Hill Monument. Exercise 31 Write a paragraph on one of the following subjects, developing your subject-sentence, in part at least, by means of reversion : 1. You live in a small town in the interior of your state. Your cousin, who lives in New York, has written you that he intends to visit you. Write to him, telling him what he need not expect to see. 2. Last night you dreamed that you visited an ideal school. The school was not like the one you now attend. 3. Write to your uncle in the city, urging him to spend the summer with you. Tell him what discomforts he will not have to suffer in the country. 4. Imagine a revolutionary veteran coming to life at the beginning of the twentieth century. 5. Imagine a twentieth-century boy visiting a Boston boy in Franklin's time. 6. Your friend from a distance has written you that he lives in an almost perfectly governed town. Reproduce his letter, naming such faults in your town government as have been remedied in his. 7. Your mother has told you about the school she attended when a girl. Reproduce her story. Additional facts can be learned from Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster and The Hoosier Schoolboy, and similar works. 8. Write a humorous paragraph in which you tell what the North Pole is not (" Accordin' to what I hear th' North Pole ain't like a tillygraft pole, a barber pole, a fishin' pole, a polecat, a poll tax, a Maypole, a Russhyan Pole, or annything that ye can see, smell, or ate. Whin ye get to it it is no diff'rent fr'm bein' annywhere on th' ice. Th' on'y way ye know ye're there is," etc., etc.—Mr. DoOLEY [P. F. Dunne], American newspaper). 9. When the circus comes to town. (Tell what they have advertised, but do not show.) G 10. On the freedom of frogs. (Take your hint from the paragraph on The Economy of Dog-Sledging, Section 14.) 11. Why Bill Lazy goes fishing. 12. There is no such fun at school nowadays as when Tom Sawyer went to school. (Tom Sawyer, you may imagine, was a fun-loving boy, of a piece with Mark Twain's boy, who once attended your school; perhaps you remember some of his pranks.) 13. On the pleasures of going barefoot. (Whittier's The Barefoot Boy will suggest the tone.) SECTION 18 Construction of Paragraphs 3. BY TELLING WHAT A THING IS LIKE: COMPARISON If you will turn to a map of California, and glance along the coast-line until your eye rests at a point midway between the northern and southern extremities of the state, you will observe that the Pacific Ocean there bites into the land to form the Bay of Monterey. If you will study the confines of the latter a moment or two, you will further observe that they form a marked and noticeable figure. Now let us suppose that you wish to convey to a friend your own vivid notion of this somewhat uncommon figure for a bay. How shall you do it? A moment's thought will convince you that the mere naming of metes and bounds, even if you should take enough pains to describe accurately their intricate turnings and windings, would not be very suggestive. It would be most effective, very likely, to compare the Bay of Monterey to some object with which your friend is familiar, and which will suggest to him the peculiar shape you have in mind. This is precisely what Stevenson has done in the following paragraph, except that he was not put to the trouble of |