Occassional Pieces in Prose and Verse; Including Five Weeks from Home in Switzerland and Savoy, 1856 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1891 Excerpt: ... superfluity of words is unavoidably pressed into duty, which either confuses the speaker or wearies the listener. Hence, unless the greatest circumspection is adopted, the "figure, metaphor, or trope," will serve but to hide the speaker's real meaning, and perhaps keep the point of his argument out of his own and his listener's sight--two most undesirable events. Therefore say we, "Reform it altogether." Death, figurative death, happens every day to hundreds of Society's members; and that by an innumerable variety of ways and means. Who has not heard of folks being tortured to death, pestered to death, frightened to death, worried to death, etc., etc., and of dying with laughter, fat'gue, vexation, spite, jealousy, anger, love, and almost every other emotion which the human mind is capable of entertaining?" What fragile constitutions, what excitable temperaments, such must be endowed with " would an uninitiated person remark on hearing these expressions. "What ridiculous, silly speeches " says the well-informed, "when nothing is further from their mental presence than this untimely occurrence--death. Surely all these passions and feelings had never been the endowments of human nature, were they thus capable of bringing man so suddenly in contact with his last enemy. No, they were planted by the Supreme Being in the breast to give a variety and a spice to mortality--purposes which, when they are properly regulated, they ably fulfil." Persons addicted to these thoughtless extravagances, when conversing on that perpetual subject, the weather, give way to the same absurd talk. In January they are always "frozen to death," in February "buried in mud," in April "drenched by the showers," in May, --no, they do not find fault with this month--in June "stifled with d...