Project Gutenberg #17957
On the Sublime
Longinus
50The ancient treatise on what makes writing great: grand thought, strong feeling, figures, noble diction, and dignified composition, in H. L. Havell's translation with Andrew Lang's introduction.
Project Gutenberg #17957 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
34
words at B2 or above
A1
A2
B1
B2
C1
C2
C2+
highlighted
at or above your level
Keyboard: focus a highlighted word and press ↓ for its actions. Esc closes; Enter opens the word page.
Missing dictionary data: 3 unique words are not in the dictionary data yet. Amber marks show where they appear.
Nothing so much degrades the tone of a style as an effeminate and hurried movement in the language, such as is produced by pyrrhics and trochees and dichorees falling in time together into a regular dance measure. Such abuse of rhythm is sure to savour of coxcombry and petty affectation, and grows tiresome in the highest degree by a monotonous sameness of tone. But its worst effect is that, as those who listen to a ballad have their attention distracted from its subject and can think of nothing but the tune, so an over-rhythmical passage does not affect the hearer by the meaning of its words, but merely by their cadence, so that sometimes, knowing where the pause must come, they beat time with the speaker, striking the expected close like dancers before the stop is reached. Equally undignified is the splitting up of a sentence into a number of little words and short syllables crowded too closely together and forced into cohesion,—hammered, as it were, successively together,—after the manner of mortice and tenon.