The fundamental image

Fundamental Device.—ELABORATION OF A UNIFYING IMAGE.

To carry out an image con¬sistently in a description requires more than a mere perception of the details of what we are describing. It calls for an effort of the creative imagination, which enables us to see resemblances between things essentially unlike.

A. MODEL.

M. Gertrais-Gaboreau could hardly be regarded as a man ; he was rather a living barometer. He sounded the winds and felt the pulse of the tides. He might be imagined requesting the clouds to show their tongue,— that is to say, their forked lightnings. He was the phy¬sician of the wave, the breeze, and the squall. The ocean was his patient. He had traveled round the world like a doctor going his rounds, examining every kind of climate in its good and bad condition. He was profoundly versed in the pathology of the seasons. —Vicros HuGo, Toilers of the Sea.

A.	EXAMPLE FOR ANALYSIS.

The whole cave represented the interior of a death's head of enormous proportions, and of a strange splen¬dor. The vault was the hollow of the brain, the arch the mouth; the sockets of the eyes were wanting. The cavern, alternately swallowing and rendering up the flow and ebb of the tide through its mouth wide open to the full noonday without, seemed to drink in the light and vomit forth bitterness,— a type of some beings intelligent and evil The roof, with its cere¬bral lobes and its rampant ramifications, like the fibres of nerves, gave out a tender reflection of chrysoprase. . . . . The effect of the scene was singular It was a wondrous palace, in which Death sat smiling and content.

— VICTOR HuGo, Toilers of the Sea.