Advanced Placement Language and Composition (AP11) Summer Reading Project 2014-15

Welcome to Advanced Placement Language and Composition! Here we will expand your academic horizons and prepare you for the challenge of the Advanced Placement Language and Composition test that will be given next May. The AP11 course is dedicated to the study of non-fiction, composition, and rhetoric. In broad strokes, we will learn to summarize, analyze, argue, and synthesize, and by the end of the school year (likely much sooner than that) we WILL be doing college level work. A score of 3, 4, or 5 on the AP Language and Composition test will validate your efforts throughout the school year and confirm that you are ready for college credit.

Good academic writing often starts with good reading, so the summer reading exercises will require you to read critically and do some accompanying writing that prepares you for the first things we’ll do in class. The summer reading assignment (SRA) is NOT the “first unit” of the school year; it is a “running start” into the school year. It I’d like you to be aware of and proficient in a few things before you get here so we can refer to these activities as we introduce more in-depth study of argument, analysis, synthesis, and critical reading. I’ve put together a collection of essays for you to read thoughtfully and critically in preparation for this and for our first unit, “What is the Purpose of Education?” Do not do this summer reading assignment throughout the summer. You should do this assignment the week before school starts, but don’t underestimate the importance of doing thorough work.

The assessment for the SRA is a test that is similar to the AP Language test. The test you take in August (and next May) will not just pose simple questions about comprehension, though those kinds of questions may be asked. Instead, the test will gauge how critically you read the essays and how thoughtfully you considered the craft with which they were written, such as stylistic and rhetorical choices, organization, tone, et al. Some guidance:

Steps to Complete the Readings and Prepare for the Test:A. Read the introductory essay, “How to Mark a Book” (Adler, 1941). Practice his techniques by re-

reading and using them on his essay.B. Look up the words at the beginning of the readings and define them. Looking them up before you

read will help you identify why they are used in the particular context in which you’ll find them as you read. They are in the order you’ll find them in the reading. These will be on the test as well. Do not ignore them or treat them as insignificant.

C. In addition, I would suggest that you give consideration and some kind of written annotation to the following:

a. What do you know about the speaker based on what you read?b. How does the speaker organize the essay?c. Who would be the intended audience for this essay? d. Why did the writer write this essay? What purpose does it serve?e. What particular strategies do you note the writer using to accomplish this purpose? f. What is the writer’s tone? Does it shift? Note that you are not required simply to record answers to these questions “a la worksheet”; instead, you should integrate such consideration and notation into the annotations you make as you read.

In addition, I would like you to define and find examples of the following literary terms. The easiest way to do this is to search for the term, definition, and examples online. You will find many. These will be on the test as well. It may do you good to find examples in the readings that follow.

alliteration allusion anaphora antithesis aphorismappositive assonance chiasmus epithet euphemismhyperbole irony memoir oxymoron paradoxpersonification premise simile vignette zeugma

Finally, you will hand in three short pieces of writing. Please type the following in 10 font Times New Roman, Courier, or Georgia. Your page should have half-inch or 1-inch margins. These are worth 20 points each. In no more than one page each, answer the following prompts:

1. Describe what you’re good at doing. In only 2-3 sentences, tell me what you’re really good at. Share something that would surprise all of us, but be specific. Be concrete. (Don’t pick something too general, like “I’m good at being a friend.” Bleh.) After identifying what you’re good at, spend

the rest of your 1-page efforts describing the process of doing what you do best. Get into the nitty-gritty of it and assume I know nothing about it, which I may not! Prioritize your knowledge and give me a crash course in your passion. If you are good at dancing ballet, how do you do it? What makes a good ballet dancer? What makes YOU a good ballet dancer? This is NOT supposed to be a simple “how to” essay or an explanation of a process. Don’t bore me. Be original. Engage your reader. Your job here is to “explode” the process so I can understand how you do what you do and what makes you good at it. (Please indicate on your writing, and in your own handwriting, whether or not I can share segments of this writing with others.)

2. Lie to me. Write three well-crafted, well-developed paragraphs that each offers something interesting about you. Start with a claim that tells me something direct and specific, then develop your claim in the paragraph with relevant explanations that make your claim convincing. Here’s a catch — make only one of the paragraphs true. Two of them should be blatant lies you make up about yourself, but ALL of the paragraphs should be convincing enough to make me think they all could be true. Your goal is to produce writing that makes it difficult or impossible for me to distinguish truth from fiction.

3. Argue. Joseph Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-British mathematician, teacher, writer, biologist, and historian of science. He hosted one of the most popular television shows produced in England, The Ascent of Man, a show that chronicled humankind’s scientific achievements. Brownoski also provided an influential voice in shaping public education in England and “across the pond” in the United States. He once asserted:

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”

Be certain you understand his claim and all the words and references in it. After you clear up any uncertainties, develop, in a single page, a clear and mature argument in which you explore Bronowski’s assertion. What do you think he means? Is he correct? What experiences do you have that validate his position? What have you observed in your 10 years of schooling that would justify, refute, or extend what he says about students? In your writing, take a position on the roles students play in learning and schooling (for they can be very different things!) Be sure to state your position clearly and explicitly. Do NO outside “research”; instead, offer specific evidence from your own experiences to justify what you say in your argument. Research is not in the parameters of this assignment and will actually count against you in evaluation.

To Summarize

1. read Adler’s essay and practice his techniques, then USE THEM on the essays that follow2. define the words at the beginning of the essays (an efficient way to do this is use

www.easydefine.com.... Use of that website is not required, but it is a fairly intuitive vocabulary defining website and it is pretty efficient)

3. read the essays4. annotate the essays for comprehension and understanding of craft5. define the literary terms and find examples of them so you have a working knowledge of them and

are able to identify their use in writing6. write three short pieces of writing doing no outside research in order to complete them

The Assessment

Your efforts in preparation will ready you for AP-style test over the readings. The test will include questions over the vocabulary and literary term requirements. You will take the AP-style reading test during the first full class period we meet. The test MAY be divided; I will let you know that day if it will be. The scores you earn on this test will be your summer reading project grade. The test will include AP-style questions over the passages as well as questions about the vocabulary and the literary terms. You will hand in your annotated reading essays. These will not count as a grade, but they will be assessed and recorded.

You will hand in your drafted essays the first time we meet, even if it is a “pink day” and a shortened period. On the very first day, come to class prepared to hand in your writing. If it is not handed in on the

first day, the best grade you will receive is a 60% of the actual score you earn on the writings, so your score on those will likely be failing. So do them early and print them at home so there is no chance you won’t have them ready to hand in when you get here!

The scores for writing the three short pieces will go in separately as writing assignments. These will be out of 10 points each and graded on the following criteria:

Engaging ME—do you keep me interested as a reader? YOUR apparent engagement—do you write with energy or do you write at the last minute just to

get it done? Following directions—did you…? Clarity of your prose—do I have to re-read your writing to make sense of it? Specific attention to detail and use of evidence—are your ideas, claims, details, and word choices

specific, or are they “blah?”

Have a great summer! Have some fun, but don’t forget to prepare, and prepare well!

How to Mark a Book

By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.

From The Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941

You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours.

Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should. If you decide that I am right about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy them. Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions.

There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher's icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your blood stream to do you any good.

Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that it is possible for a man to acquire the idea, to possess the beauty, which a great book contains, without staking his claim by pasting his bookplate inside the cover. Having a fine library doesn't prove that its owner has a mind enriched by books; it proves nothing more than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich enough to buy them.

There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers -- unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books -- a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many -- every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)

Is it false respect, you may ask, to preserve intact and unblemished a beautifully printed book, an elegantly bound edition? Of course not. I'd no more scribble all over a first edition of 'Paradise Lost' than I'd give my baby a set of crayons and an original Rembrandt. I wouldn't mark up a painting or a statue. Its soul, so to speak, is inseparable from its body. And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue.

But the soul of a book "can" be separate from its body. A book is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music. Arturo Toscanini reveres Brahms, but Toscanini's score of the G minor Symphony is so thoroughly marked up that no one but the maestro himself can read it. The reason why a great conductor makes notations on his musical scores -- marks them up again and again each time he returns to study them--is the reason why you should mark your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author.

Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points.

If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, Gone with the Wind, doesn't require the most active kind of reading. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do while you're asleep.

If, when you've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively. The most famous "active" reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule of business activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories' on the margins. When that happens, he puts the book down. He knows he's too tired to read, and he's just wasting time.

But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.

Even if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.

And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; naturally, you'll have the proper humility as you approach him. But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:

Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements. Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined. Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or

twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)

Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.

Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.

Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases. Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording

questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.

The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I've already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work.

If you're a die-hard anti-book-marker, you may object that the margins, the space between the lines, and the end-papers don't give you room enough. All right. How about using a scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the book -- so that the edges of the sheets won't protrude? Make your index, outlines and even your notes on the pad, and then insert these sheets permanently inside the front and back covers of the book.

Or, you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will not be impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper.

You may have one final objection to marking books. You can't lend them to your friends because nobody else can read them without being distracted by your notes. Furthermore, you won't want to lend them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual diary, and lending it is almost like giving your mind away.

If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat -- but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart. (1941)

Essay 1

Welcome To 'Animal House’Anna QuindlenOctober 23, 2000

nadirzenithlampoonbalderdash

boorishsalutary

The student occupation of buildings at Columbia University in 1968 remains the zenith or the nadir of all campus protests, depending on your politics. Richard Nixon (he was on the nadir side) warned in its wake that it was "the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of the country."

If Mr. Nixon were alive today, perhaps he would be surprised to learn that the revolutionary struggle is now in defense of beer, basketball and bad behavior.

College students have settled in to campuses across America, with their backpacks, their laptops and their some-assembly- required bookshelves, and as certain as carbohydrates in the food-service menu, sooner or later there will be keening about how the poor kids are awash in a welter of political correctness. "Menstruation and Medea: Fear of the Female in the Classics," or "From the Slave Cabins to the Recording Studio: Black in a White Economy"--it's so easy to lampoon the lament that campus life is infused with hyperannuated regard for the sensibilities of minority students and women. There is a sadly out-of-date white Anglo-Saxon term for this point of view. It is balderdash.

The real prevailing ethos on many campuses is quite the opposite. Take the uprisings this semester at Indiana University. These demonstrations were inspired not by the economic disparity between rich and poor or by corporate imperialism, but by the firing of a man who coaches basketball. Space here is limited, so it is not possible to describe all the boorish behavior for which the Indiana coach, Bobby Knight, has become known over the years. He's thrown furniture, assaulted players, verbally abused both school officials and referees, cursed at opponents and won a lot of games.

Obviously Mr. Knight's personal style made a huge impact on campus, since students responded to his long-overdue dismissal by setting fires, toppling light poles and so menacing the president of the university that he and his wife fled their home and moved into a hotel. "History was in the making, and I was not going to miss this for the world, and certainly not for homework," one dopey student, whose parents should stop payment on his tuition check immediately, wrote of the riot.

This reaction was not totally unexpected. A professor of English, Murray Sperber, who has been critical of Knight in print and on television, was on leave last year from the university, in part because of letters like the one with the Star of David repeatedly scribbled on it, or the voice-mail message "If you don't shut up, I'll shut you up." In his book "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education," Professor Sperber says that at schools like Indiana with prominent and successful sports programs, athletics overshadow scholarship, leading to a culture in which students spend more time partying than studying, in which a basketball coach can be infinitely more important than the school's president.

But the "Animal House" effect in higher education is not confined to big state schools with monster sports teams. MIT, one of the finest science schools in the world, recently agreed to pay almost $5 million to the family of a student who died of acute alcohol poisoning during a fraternity-pledge event. Any number of colleges have identified the fraternity culture of long nights and endless kegs as a source of problems ranging from vandalism to date rape, but students respond badly to any attempt to curtail the Greek system. Really badly. When she was president of Denison, Michele Tolela Myers decided that the fraternities at the Ohio school should be nonresidential to cut down on the boozing and bad behavior.

"Frat boys put dead animals outside the front door of our house, someone threw a billiard ball through our living-room window," recalled Myers, who is now president of Sarah Lawrence. And it was clear that the students had learned at the knee of like-minded adults. Myers got name-calling hate mail from alums: "the bitch, the Jew, she should go back East where she belongs." So much for P.C.

Contrary to all the nattering about political correctness, the social atmosphere on many campuses is macho and exclusionary and determinedly anti-intellectual. It's an atmosphere in which much of the social life revolves around drinking. It's an atmosphere in which date rape is rampant. One study says that six or seven out of every 50 college women have been victims of acquaintance rape within a single year. It may be provocative to suggest that the new civility codes and sexual-assault policies on certain campuses are a

product of oversensitivity about issues of race and gender. But it's more accurate to say that they are long-overdue responses to problems of speech and behavior that have been ignored for years.

The Columbia protests marked the beginning of the end of in locoparentis, the notion that the administration stood in for parents in terms of setting limits and making rules. But Myers's experience indicates that if officials are willing to take a strong stand against individuals and organizations that poison a community--and are willing to put up with a distressing amount of personal abuse and enforce real-world legal statutes--the end result will be salutary. She recalls that Denison had its best applicant pool of her tenure after the fraternity decision because it was no longer seen by parents and college counselors as an unreconstructed party school.

Americans of my parents' generation were horrified by what happened at Columbia in 1968: the files destroyed, the dean held hostage. But if the actions were questionable, the impulse had meaning: opposition to the war in Vietnam, to the university's research contracts with the Pentagon and its plan to co-opt a park in Harlem to build a gym. Three decades later, and we have campus uprisings dedicated to the preservation of a winning season at any cost. Left wing on campus? Don't be fooled. In lots of places, it's not a political stance. It's a position on the hockey team.

Essay 2from The SpectatorJoseph Addison

May 11, 1711

congruityenigmasdoggerelinsinuateepigrams

Mr. Locke has an admirable reflection upon the difference of wit and judgment, whereby he endeavours to show the reason why they are not always the talents of the same person. His words are as follow: ' And hence, perhaps, may be given some reason of that common observation, that men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment, or deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and is therefore so acceptable to all people.'

This is, I think, the best and most philosophical account that I have ever met with of wit, which generally, though not always, consists in such a resemblance and congruity of ideas as this author mentions. I shall only add to it, by way of explanation, that every resemblance of ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives delight and surprise to the reader. These two properties seem essential to wit, more particularly the last of them. In order therefore that the resemblance in the ideas be wit, it is necessary that the ideas should not lie too near one another in the nature of things; for where the likeness is obvious, it gives no surprise. To compare one man's singing to that of another, or to represent the whiteness of any object by that of milk and snow, or the variety of its colours by those of the rainbow, cannot be called wit, unless, besides this obvious resemblance, there be some further congruity discovered in the two ideas that is capable of giving the reader some surprise. Thus when a poet tells us, the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too, it then grows into wit. Every reader's memory may supply him with innumerable instances of the same nature. For this reason, the similitudes in heroic poets, who endeavour rather to fill the mind with great conceptions, than to divert it with such as are new and surprising, have seldom anything in them that can be called wit. Mr. Locke's account of wit, with this short explanation, comprehends most of the species of wit, as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams, visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion: as there are many other pieces of wit (how remote soever they may appear at first sight from the foregoing description) which upon examination will be found to agree with it.

As true wit generally consists in this resemblance and congruity of ideas, false wit chiefly consists in the resemblance and congruity sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes and doggerel rhymes; sometimes of words, as in puns and quibbles; and sometimes of whole sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or altars: nay, some carry the notion of wit so far, as to ascribe it even to external mimicry; and to look upon a man as an ingenious person, that can resemble the tone, posture, or face of another. As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances; there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas, and partly in the resemblance of words; which for distinction's sake I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley, more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had a genius much above it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians, even in their epic poetry, are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greek writers, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are indeed some strokes of it in the the poem ascribed to Musaeus, which by that, as well as many other marks, betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers, we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial.

Out of the innumerable branches of mixed wit, I shall choose one instance which may be met with in all the writers of this class. The passion of love in its nature has been thought to resemble fire; for which reason

the words fire and flame are made use of to signify love. The witty poets therefore have taken an advantage from the doubtful meaning of the word fire, to make an infinite number of witticisms. Cowley observing the cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and at the same time their power of producing love in him, considers them as burning-glasses made of ice; and finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. When his mistress has read his letter written in juice of lemon by holding it to the fire, he desires her to read it over a second time by love's flames. When she weeps, he wishes it were inward heat that distilled those drops from the limbec. When she is absent he is beyond eighty, that is, thirty degrees nearer the pole than when she is with him. His ambitious love is a fire that naturally mounts upwards; his happy love is the beams of heaven, and his unhappy love flames of hell. When it does not let him sleep, it is a flame that sends up no smoke; when it is opposed by counsel and advice, it is a fire that rages the more by the wind's blowing upon it Upon the dying of a tree in which he had cut his loves, he observes that his written flames had burned up and withered the tree. When he resolves to give over his passion, he tells us that one burnt like him for ever dreads the fire. His heart is an Aetna, that instead of Vulcan's shop encloses Cupid's forge in it. His endeavouring to drown his love in wine, is throwing oil upon the fire. He would insinuate to his mistress, that the fire of love, like that of the sun (which produces so many living creatures) should not only warm but beget. Love in another place cooks pleasure at his fire. Sometimes the poet's heart is frozen in every breast, and sometimes scorched in every eye. Sometimes he is drowned in tears, and burnt in love, like a ship set on fire in the middle of the sea.

The reader may observe in every one of these instances, that the poet mixes the qualities of fire with those of love; and in the same sentence speaking of it both as a passion, and as real fire, surprises the reader with those seeming resemblances or contradictions that make up all the wit in this kind of writing. Mixed wit therefore is a composition of pun and true wit, and is more or less perfect as the resemblance lies in the ideas or in the words: its foundations are laid partly in falsehood and partly in truth: reason puts in her claim for one half of it, and extravagance for the other. The only province therefore for this kind of wit, is epigram, or those little occasional poems that in their own nature are nothing else but a tissue of epigrams. I cannot conclude this head of mixed wit, without owning that the admirable poet out of whom I have taken the examples of it, had as much true wit as any author that ever writ and indeed all other talents of an extraordinary genius.

It may be expected, since I am upon this subject, that I should take notice of Mr. Dryden's definition of wit; which, with all the deference that is due to the judgment of so great a man, is not so properly a definition of wit, as of good writing in general. Wit, as he defines it, is a 'propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject.' If this be a true definition of wit, I am apt to think that Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper: it is certain there never was a greater propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject, than what that author has made use of in his elements. I shall only appeal to my reader, if this definition agrees with any notion he has of wit…

Essay 3

The American ScholarRalph Waldo EmersonAn Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837

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Mr. President and Gentlemen,

I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?

In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, — the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.' In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A thought too bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, — learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, — by considering their value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, — the act of thought, — is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; — cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years. Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.

Essay 4

Semi-ColonBarbara MalloneeDecember 27, 1993

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Shadows stir; the season shifts. As I sit in the first winter sunshine, reading the morning papers, the print rises up, coldly poised, perfected in a way that the writing I am next to read is not. In stacks of student essays, language flies across the open page as wildly as the last brown leaves across the campus quad. Pens in hand, the faculty gear up to rake the prose about, trimming a sentence here, planting commas there, carting off redundancy.

As winter chill sets in, I look at warm young faces and wish it were the semi-colon they yearned to learn. A point I think a fine point they think much too fine a point. They are still tilting at words, and even I have to admit that as an object of study the semi-colon seems obscure, its place in the path of paleography lost in the dust of time.

The mark was used by Greek grammarians in the schools of Alexandria. By the end of the 15th century, British pundits and three generations of Venetian printers named Manutius were using it and other punctuation marks to regularize pauses in print. For three more centuries, it flourished, even on rough American shores. In the 20th, if it has not perished in practice, in praise it is long overdue.What kind of name is ''semi-colon,'' really? The mark hasn't the braking power of a colon and might be thought half of its worth were sectioning speech the sole function of punctuation -- but it is not. Like the question mark (?), the exclamation point (!), and the colon (:), the semi-colon (;) amplifies the power of the period (.). It has its peculiar purpose. Most punctuation marks arose as aids to elocution; the semi-colon serves not the outspoken orator, but the silent writer solitary at his desk. While speech streams forth like birdsong, rows of prose take slow root in the fields and beds and pots of print. Brought from the old world to brave the new, the imperturbable semi-colon upholds the virtues of cultivated thought.It engenders a well-bred economy. Even in an age awash in information, a sentence is a dear commodity. Overseen by the semi-colon, the well-tended sentence can hold any number of things: ''apples, prunes, persimmons; linen and lace; pheasant, roast beef, goose; eggnog, brandy.'' Under the framework of a single sentence can also be gathered two or more sentences' worth of useful thought. Wrote, for example, Ben Franklin, ''When men are employed, they are best contented; for on the days they worked, they were good-natured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day's work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days, they were mutinous and quarrelsome.'' Less capacious, more terse was Francis Bacon: ''Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.''A mixed blessing, to be sure. Adversity occasions the troubles that become our daily news. At home and abroad wars rage over civil rights, civic wrongs, guns and arms, forests, disease, the homeless, the infirm, the illiterate, the neglected, the abused, the unemployed, the poor. Writers have long arisen to address their contentious times. A tart Samuel Johnson could pen, ''I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding,'' but all writers work that harmony might grow.With the swift stroke of pen or pencil, the semi-colon subdues strife. It does so not by stilling or ignoring opposition; within a grammatic arena, it coolly balances hotly contested views. Franklin D. Roosevelt owed to this small mark a great deal, for he distilled into one measured sentence the New Deal: ''The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we can provide enough for those who have too little.''''Simplify, simplify,'' wrote Henry David Thoreau, who labored in the cold drafts in winter to refine a harvest of fruitful thought. ''The intellect,'' he argued, ''is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. . . . My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing as some other creatures use their snout and forepaws.''As the first snow falls, the fall semester almost over, I look at young heads bent over rows of prose. Education is an investment their parents feel it prudent to make. Wrote E. B. White in One Man's Meat, ''School buildings are heated by wood stoves except the high school, which has a furnace. At the end of the year, the account stood: for fuel, $439.44; for teachers, $2,600.40. Thus, it costs one-sixth as much to heat pupil's bodies as their minds, minds being slower to kindle.''

At a time when too few have food and fuel for mind and body, young people have still the luxury of learning to cultivate thought. In a world where one man's meat is always another man's poison, the semi-colon survives each vanished era. It has great staying power for it knows the habit of accommodation. Under its classic tutelage, wit is expended, wisdom grows.

Essay 5

Corn-Pone OpinionsMark Twain 1901

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Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man--a slave--who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would someday be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards he was overlooked. It is the way, in this world.

He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a stick of wood; but the sawing was a pretense--he did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood. But it served its purpose; it kept his master from coming out to see how the work was getting along. I

listened to the sermons from the open window of a lumber room at the back of the house. One of his texts was this:

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."

I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions--at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far enough.

1. It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention.This happens, but I think it is not the rule.

2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing--if it has indeed ever existed.

A new thing in costume appears--the flaring hoopskirt, for example--and the passers-by are shocked, and the irreverent laugh. Six months later everybody is reconciled; the fashion has established itself; it is admired, now, and no one laughs. Public opinion resented it before, public opinion accepts it now, and is happy in it. Why? Was the resentment reasoned out? Was the acceptance reasoned out? No. The instinct that moves to conformity did the work. It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. We all have to bow to that; there are no exceptions. Even the woman who refuses from first to last to wear the hoopskirt comes under that law and is its slave; she could not wear the skirt and have her own approval; and that she must have, she cannot help herself. But as a rule our self-approval has its source in but one place and not elsewhere--the approval of other people. A person of vast consequences can introduce any kind of novelty in dress and the general world will presently adopt it--moved to do it, in the first place, by the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority, and in the second place by the human instinct to train with the multitude and have its approval. An empress introduced the hoopskirt, and we know the result. A nobody introduced the bloomer, and we know the result. If Eve should come again, in her ripe renown, and reintroduce her quaint styles--well, we know what would happen. And we should be cruelly embarrassed, along at first.

The hoopskirt runs its course and disappears. Nobody reasons about it. One woman abandons the fashion; her neighbor notices this and follows her lead; this influences the next woman; and so on and so on, and presently the skirt has vanished out of the world, no one knows how nor why, nor cares, for that matter. It will come again, by and by and in due course will go again.

Twenty-five years ago, in England, six or eight wine glasses stood grouped by each person's plate at a dinner party, and they were used, not left idle and empty; today there are but three or four in the group, and the average guest sparingly uses about two of them. We have not adopted this new fashion yet, but we shall do it presently. We shall not think it out; we shall merely conform, and let it go at that. We get our notions and habits and opinions from outside influences; we do not have to study them out.

Our table manners, and company manners, and street manners change from time to time, but the changes are not reasoned out; we merely notice and conform. We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we

do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards that will stick; what we mistake for standards are only fashions, and perishable. We may continue to admire them, but we drop the use of them. We notice this in literature. Shakespeare is a standard, and fifty years ago we used to write tragedies which we couldn't tell from--from somebody else's; but we don't do it anymore, now. Our prose standard, three quarters of a century ago, was ornate and diffuse; some authority or other changed it in the direction of compactness and simplicity, and conformity followed, without argument. The historical novel starts up suddenly, and sweeps the land. Everybody writes one, and the nation is glad. We had historical novels before; but nobody read them, and the rest of us conformed--without reasoning it out. We are conforming in the other way, now, because it is another case of everybody.

The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking. A man must and will have his own approval first of all, in each and every moment and circumstance of his life--even if he must repent of a self-approved act the moment after its commission, in order to get his self-approval again: but, speaking in general terms, a man's self-approval in the large concerns of life has its source in the approval of the peoples about him, and not in a searching personal examination of the matter. Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest--the bread-and-butter interest--but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise--a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way.

A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties--the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety--the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his lifelong principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.

In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom--and came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have deeply studied that question, too--and didn't arrive. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a Boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God. Pr'aps.

I suppose that in more cases than we should like to admit, we have two sets of opinions: one private, the other public; one secret and sincere, the other corn-pone, and more or less tainted.