[Analysis.-1. What is Vision? The Book of Revelation. Cicero's use of this figure.-2. The extract.-3. Dr. Cheever's use of this figure: Bunyan in prison.4. Use of Vision in the description of the eagle.-5. Use in narrative and description, etc.-6, 7. Everett's description of the voyage of the Mayflower.-S, 9, 10, 11. Everett's use of the apostrophe in the same connection.-12, 13. A portion of the same scene, as painted by Dr. Cheever.-14. What this figure of speech supposes, and on what its effect depends.-15. When this figure will be a failure. Counterfeited warmth.]

1. VISION is a figure of speech in which some past, future, absent, or fancied occurrence is represented as actually passing, in vision, before our eyes. Thus the Book of Revelation is a description of a continued vision. When Cicero, in his fourth oration against the conspirator Catiline, after portraying the horrors of the plot to liberate the prisoners, massacre the senators, and open the gates to Catiline, pictures forth the following future scene as a present reality, he makes use of this figure to inflame the imaginations of the senators and arouse them to action.

2. "I seem to myself to behold this city, the ornament of the earth, and the capital of all nations, suddenly involved in one great conflagration. I see before me the slaughtered heaps of citizens lying unburied in the midst of their ruined country. The furious countenance of Cethegus rises to my view, while with a savage joy he is triumphing in your miseries."

3. It is in the use of this figure that Dr. Cheever thus describes Bunyan, when in prison, nearly two hundred years ago.

II. BUNYAN IN PRISON.

"And now it is evening. A rude lamp glimmers darkly on the table, the tagged laces are laid aside, and Bunyan, alone, is busy with his Bible, the concordance, and his pen, ink, and paper. He writes as though joy did make him write. His pale, worn countenance is lighted with a fire, as if reflected from the radiant jasper walls of the Celestial City. He writes, and smiles, and clasps his hands, and looks

upward, and blesses God for his goodness, and then again turns to his writing. The last you see of him for the night, he is alone, kneeling on the floor of his prison;-he is alone, with God."

4. For the description of absent objects, or of fancy scenes as present, we select the following from a discourse by Rev. Dr. Hopkins, of Williams College.

III. THE EAGLE.

"See the eagle as he leaves his perch. He flaps his broad wing, and moves heavily. Slowly he lifts himself above the horizon till the inspiration of a freer air quickens him. Now there is new lightning in his eye, and new strength in his

pinions. See-how he mounts! Now he is midway in the heavens. Higher he rises-still higher. Now his broad circles are narrowing to a point-he is fading away in the deep blue. Now he is a speck. Now he is gone."

5. This figure of vision, or ideal presence as it is sometimes called, is often used with happy effect in narrative and description, where the object is to raise such lively and distinct images as will give to past scenes a living reality. Thus Everett, in an oration on the Pilgrims, uses this figure in a sublime description of the tedious and perilous voyage of the Mayflower:

IV. VOYAGE OF THE MAYFLOWER.

6. "Methinks I see it now; that one solitary, adventurous vessel, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and borne across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Şuns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their illstored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves.

7. "The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggering vessel. I see them escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth-weak and weary from the voyage-poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shorewithout shelter-without means surrounded by hostile tribes."

8. Here closes this vivid description; when the speaker,

changing the scene, introduces another figure, the apostrophe, and calls upon the "man of military science," and the "student of history," to foretell the result: and while the speaker still reverts to the past reality as an adventure that must have failed, his hearers, knowing that it was not a failure, are thereby the more deeply impressed with the wonderful results that have sprung from beginnings so small and so adverse.

V. FATE OF THE ADVENTURERS.

9. "Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how many months they were all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast?

10. "Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this. Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children'; was it hard labor and spare meals'; was it disease'; was it the tomahawk'; was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching, in its last moments, at the recollection of the loved and left beyond the sea'; was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate'?

11. "And is it possible that neither of these causes-that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope'? Is it possible, that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there has gone forth a progress so steady', a growth so wonderful', a reality so important', a promise yet to be fulfilled, so glorious'?"

12. A portion of the same scene described by Everett has been so beautifully painted by Dr. Cheever, that we think the additional picture will not weary:

VI. THE MAYFLOWER AND THE PILGRIMS.

"It is a lowering winter's day: on a coast, rock-bound and perilous, sheeted with ice and snow, hovers a small vessel, worn and weary, like a bird with wet plumage, driven in a storm from its nest, and timidly seeking shelter. It is the Mayflower thrown on the bosom of Winter. The very sea is freezing the earth is as still as the grave, covered with snow, and as hard as iron; there is no sign of a human habitation; the deep forests have lost their foliage, and rise over the land like a shadowy congregation of skeletons.

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13. “Yet there is a band of human beings on board that weather-beaten vessel, and they have voluntarily come to this savage coast to spend the rest of their lives, and to die there. Eight thousand miles they have straggled across the ocean, from a land of plenty and comfort, from their own beloved country, from their homes, firesides, friends, to gather around an altar to God, in the winter, in the wilderness! What does it all mean? It marks, to a noble mind, the invaluable blessedness of freedom to worship God."

14. The figure of speech which we have been describing, most frequently combined with soliloquy, and, in character, nearly approaching the apostrophe, supposes an uncommonly warm imagination on the part of the speaker or writer, and a degree of enthusiasm which carries him, in a manner, out of himself, causing him to see what he is describing: and if he can produce the same temporary illusion in his hearers or readers, the impression which he makes will be exceedingly vivid; for sympathy is the most powerful of all principles in exciting emotion.

15. But in proportion to the exceeding beauty and force of this figure when well executed, and when nature and passion speak through it, so will its failure be great when the attempt to awaken sympathy fails,-throwing ridicule upon the author, and leaving the reader or hearer more cool and uninterested than he was before. "When," says Dr. Blair, "we seek to counterfeit a warmth we do not feel, no figures will either supply the defect, or conceal the imposture."