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So vivid were they, in his

of a child, or a very young man. relation of them, that he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or print of a chintz morning-dress, which he had seen their mother wear, in the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a woman's accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from what Clifford described; but producing the very gown from an old trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike, undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill, from the morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain, and pallid hue of misfortune, with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber. But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but slept open-eyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then.

Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had ympathies with children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into which rivulets were pouring, not far from the fountain head. Though prevented, by a subtile sense of propriety, from desiring to associate with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched window, and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together, as flies do in a sunny room 1

69. Movement in description. - Ordinarily, the point of view in description is fixed. It is permissible, 1 Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables.

however, to introduce movement into description, and thus have the viewpoint a changing one; but in this case the reader must be kept duly informed as to each change in the point of view. If this is not done, the result will almost surely be confusion. The picture will have a blurred effect like that produced in a photograph when the camera is shifted during the exposure of the plate.

As an illustration of how the point of view may change, yet without loss of distinctness in the resulting picture, take the following:

A moment after passing the gate you are in twilight, though the sun may be blinding on the white road without. All about you is a green gloaming, up through which you see immense trunks rising. Follow the first path that slopes up on your left as you proceed, if you wish to obtain the best general view of the place in the shortest possible time. As you proceed, the garden on your right deepens more and more into a sort of ravine; on your left rises a sort of foliage-shrouded cliff; and all this in a beautiful crepuscular dimness, made by the foliage of great trees meeting overhead. Palms rooted a hundred feet below you hold their heads a hundred feet above you; yet they can barely reach the light. Farther on the ravine widens to frame in two tiny lakes, dotted with artificial islands, which are miniatures of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica: these are covered with tropical plants, many of which are total strangers even here: they are natives of India, Senegambia, Algeria, and the most eastern East. Arborescent ferns of unfamiliar elegance curve up from path-verge or lake-brink; and the great arbre-duvoyageur outspreads its colossal fan. Giant lianas droop down over the way in loops and festoons; tapering green cords, which are creepers descending to take root, hang everywhere;

and parasites with stems as thick as cables coil about the trees like boas. Trunks shooting up out of sight, into the green wilderness above, display no bark; you cannot guess what sort of trees they are; they are so thickly wrapped in creepers as to seem pillars of leaves. Between you and the sky, where everything is fighting for the sun, there is an almost unbroken vault of leaves, a cloudy green confusion in which nothing particular is distinguishable.

You come to breaks now and then in the green steep to your left, openings created for cascades pouring down from one mossed basin of brown stone to another, or gaps occupied by flights of stone steps, green with mosses, and chocolate-colored by age. These steps lead to loftier paths; and all the grottos, bridges, basins, terraces, steps,

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are darkened by time and velveted with mossy things. It is of another century, this garden: special ordinances were passed concerning it during the French Revolution. It is very quaint; it suggests an art spirit as old as Versailles, or older; but it is indescribably beautiful even now.

At last you near the end, to hear the roar of falling water; there is a break in the vault of green above the bed of a river below you; and at a sudden turn you come in sight of the cascade. Before you is the Morne itself; and against the burst of descending light you discern a precipice-verge. Over it, down one green furrow in its brow, tumbles the rolling foam of a cataract, like falling smoke, to be caught below in a succession of moss-covered basins. The first clear leap of the water is nearly seventy feet.

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Returning by another path, you may have a view of other cascades — though none so imposing. But they are beautiful; and you will not soon forget the effect of one flanked at its summit by white-stemmed palms which lift their leaves so high into the light that the loftiness of them gives the sensation of vertigo. Dizzy also the magnificence of the great colonnade of palmistes and angelins, two hundred feet high,

through which you pass if you follow the river-path from the cascade, - the famed Allée des duels.1

Note, also, the distinctness of the following series of mental pictures, where, though the point of view changes frequently, there is not the slightest trace of blur or confusion:

The scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the 1 Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies, pp. 60-62.

public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynne, yes, at herself, who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold-thread, upon her bosom.1

Description of this kind differs, obviously, in very few respects from narration. The passage just quoted might almost, in fact, be regarded as narration. Hawthorne's purpose is to review rapidly, yet with as much vividness as possible, the course of events in the early life of his heroine. To do this, he adopts the descriptive, rather than the narrative method; but he puts as much movement into his description as possible.

The use of movement in description may, indeed, be carried so far as to cause the description to pass frankly into narration. The following passage from Kipling's City of Dreadful Night, where the main purpose is clearly descriptive though the method is narrative, will illustrate the point:

The dense wet heat that hung over the face of the land, like a blanket, prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance. The cicalas helped the heat; and the yelling jackals the cicalas. It was impossible to sit still in the dark, empty, echoing house

1 Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

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