You have been told repeatedly that one of the most important habits for you to gain in your study of language, is that of saying just what you mean. You will perhaps be surprised to be told now that the best writers often say something that, if we take the words in their ordinary meaning, is very different from what the authors really mean. You may be still more surprised to know that they do this intentionally, and that by so doing they express their real thoughts more beautifully or more strikingly than if they had used words in their usual sense.

A turning of words from their common every-day meaning for the sake of making a thought more striking is called figurative language, or a figure of speech. When words are used in their ordinary sense, language is said to be literal.

You have often read, heard, and even yourself used figurative language without thinking of it as being in any way peculiar. • Notice a few illustrations of figures of speech.

Leigh Hunt in one of his poems says that the presence of an angel within the moonlight in Abou Ben Adhem's cell made the room like a lily in bloom. Now a room surely is not in most respects like a lily, still the poet's words give us the beautiful picture that he wished to convey.

Emerson in his Concord Hymn says:

"Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world."

Of course the shot wasn't really "heard round the world"; but we are more impressed by the author's thought than if he had said in plain matter-of-fact fashion that the influence of the shot was felt throughout the world.

Whittier in his poem, The Barefoot Boy, calls shoes, "prison cells of pride"; and Holmes in The Chambered Nautilus calls the shell of the nautilus a "ship of pearl."

You have heard a quiet child called a mouse; a stubborn man, a bulldog; a cheerful person, a ray of sunshine. You have heard a flower garden described as gay, and the wind as mournful.

Mrs. Hemans in The Voice of Spring makes spring talk as if it were a person:

"I come! I come! Ye have called me long. I come o'er the mountains with light and song!"

Longfellow addresses a river as if it were a person:

"Thou hast taught me, silent River! Many a lesson, deep and long."

All these are examples of figurative language. Two of the more common kinds of figures of speech are called the simile and the metaphor.