the first place, that only those which are most prominent or striking be chosen. These are what we may term the suggestive details, — the details that best stimulate the reader's mind to form the desired image or impression. Moreover, only so many details as are necessary should be used, and no more. Superfluous details have a confusing effect, and tend to blur the reader's mental picture. Distinctness of impression is one of the first things, the very first thing, in fact, -that should be aimed at in description. The picture in the reader's mind should be clear and distinct; and that this may be so, only those details should be mentioned which are at once suggestive and necessary as a means of calling up the desired image.

With regard to the arrangement of these details, the method ordinarily employed is that of simple enumeration according to some obvious plan. Mere enumeration without a plan will not serve the writer's purpose. The details must be arranged with as much regard as possible to the aid they give one another in their image or picture suggesting capacity. Bad arrangement will often spoil the effect of the most admirably chosen details.

68. The point of view. As to what details are most striking and what arrangement is likely to be most effective, the writer can best judge if he keeps always in mind the point of view from which he observes the thing to be described. That point of view must, of course, be definite, else the writer's own

impression will be vague and his chances of producing a vivid impression on the mind of the reader correspondingly slim. No one can make another see clearly what he does not see clearly himself. If, for instance, the writer wishes to describe a bit of scenery, he must first get a clear image of it in his own mind, which can be done only by viewing it, in reality or in imagination, from some point in the foreground. Viewed from this point, certain features of the scene will stand out more prominently than others and will relate themselves in a particular way. These features are the suggestive ones, and this particular relation the one that the writer should seek to reproduce.

Note the distinctness of this sketch from Stevenson's Edinburgh, a distinctness attained by fixing the point of view and by attending carefully to the perspective:

Kirk Yetton forms the northeastern angle of the range; thence, the Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the Lammermoors and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in the landscape. All around, cultivated fields,

and woods, and smoking villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and standing corn, and sends pulses of varying color across the landscape. So you sit, like Jupiter upon Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill. The sea surf, the cries of plowmen, the streams and the millwheels, the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance; and yet from this Olympian. station, except for the whispering rumor of a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence and the business of town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful labor.

The same careful attention to point of view and grouping of details is observable in the following sketch of an interior by Hawthorne:

The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward, caught some of the earliest light, and

threw down its golden gleam on the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the Hou e of the Seven Gables, which many such sunrises as it had witnessed - looked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. It was a low-studded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with dark wood, and having a large chimney-piece, set around with pictured tiles, but now closed by an iron fireboard, through which ran the funnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded, in these latter years, that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable hue. In the way of furniture, there were two tables: one, constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time the ancient tea-table had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was, however, in a very antique elbow-chair, with a high back, carved elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in a modern chair.1

The term "point of view," as applied to descriptions like those just quoted, means, of course, the real viewpoint, the point from which the things described are, or may be, actually seen. Applied to descrip

1 The House of Seven Gables.

tions of character or mental states, however, the term, obviously, must be taken in a metaphorical sense. In this case, to say that a writer must keep his point of view in mind, means simply that he must select and group the details he mentions in such a way that they will appeal to the reader's imagination as a whole, and not as separate and unrelated fragments. This he can do most readily by making some one trait of the character or mental state described the dominating trait or principle of the whole, and subordinating all others to it.

Note, for example, the effectiveness of the following description of the character of Clifford Pyncheon, after his return from prison, where his likeness to a child is made the dominating trait:

But it would be no fair picture of Clifford's state of mind, were we to represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled, which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by the very process of providing for their support. In this respect, he was a child, a child for the whole term of his existence, be it long or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the sufferer's reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part