When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in Heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather behold the gorgeous Ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—

It started with a bill to form a committee to recommend whether sales of public lands should be suspended for a time. The bill reached the Senate floor in 1830; the debate should have been a snoozer, and it would have been, if Robert Hayne, the senior Senator from South Carolina, had not risen to speak about the bill’s connection to the nature of the American Union, and had not Daniel Webster risen to rebut him. The passage above comes from Webster’s second speech, delivered, if you can imagine, to the United States Senate, on January 27 of that year.

I like the passage because it is so thoroughly steeped in a sense of the past without actually animating it with detail (say with tales of fallen soldiers, or the Bill of Rights, or landscapes of the republic’s dark fields or purple mountains, or whatever); indeed the only specifics refer to accidents of our national flag’s design.

This sense of history (vague though it might be) comes not just from Webster’s basic conceit of bemoaning his fallen country from his deathbed; it is embroidered in the language itself, in his selected parts of speech. For instance, the two sentences above contain eleven past participles: broken, dishonored, dissevered, rent, drenched, known, honored, advanced, erased, polluted, and obscured.

Why are the parts of speech important? The past participle implies past action, that something was done; it is in its nature more historical than the equivalent adjective. To appreciate the effect, take the last two phrases:

not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—

A lesser writer might have written, synonymously though less euphoniously:

not a stripe dirty or missing, nor a single star invisible—

dirty and missing tell us what the stripes are, to be sure; but they don’t tell us what happened. (Perhaps someone needed the flag fabric for a wedding dress?) Erased and polluted tell us how things are and how they came to be.

The passage has a hundred other merits, but rather than drone on about them, I’ll leave you with the rest of the passage, which formed the conclusion of Webster’s famous speech. It is a bit bombastic to 21st century, headphone-insulated ears—probably bombastic to 19th century horn-assisted ears as well—but its diction and drama merit study:

…not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single start obscured—bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards—but every where, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole Heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseperable!

Further reading: The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union (Daniel Webster, et al)

Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could thrown in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood of the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.

If one can get past H.L. Mencken’s harshness (his writing, I note, expanded my adolescent vocabulary to include cad, bounder, bosh, buncome, poltroon, charlatan, and mountebank), one can discover a number of admirable qualities in his prose. Among them I quite like the faux statistic, the technique of comparing two things, or else asserting a near-universality, with unresearched numerical specificity. The device appears in the passage above here: There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac. An acre, eh? Not a hectare, a square click or square mile? Mencken talks as if he had consulted his Atlas of Accomplished Gentlemen to arrive at his astonishing conclusion, but of course he consulted nothing other than his Muse.

The faux statistic instructs the mind to comprehend a particular magnitude; in expending the energy to imagine the size of an acre (how large is my backyard?), the imagination spends more time with the image and therefore finds it more vivid and compelling, even though the ratiocinating faculties demand more (some!) evidence. This trick might cause your college professor to spill half an ounce of red ink in protest, but if your concern is not cautious argument but a more spiritual Truth, there’s nothing more effective than a few made-up facts.

But there was one hope left, a glimpse of the old code and toughness, of salvation lubricated in all its pistons by desperate successful perspiration, a “local boy who made good” for every American locale (because he can rest in none), RICHARD NIXON steam-engining down the track, somehow un-derailed by history, cheered by those hoping he could reestablish the copybook maxims he lived by—though his type is fading now (become “forgotten”), he went on regardless, did not spare himself, this churning engine that knew-that-it-could (rack-it-ty-tack), knew it would (racky-rack) run the track’s happy length, clack off on that endless dreamed roadbed that—ended. Grass on it.

It’s tempting to discuss the sentence structure of this passage from Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills; but the technique is so similar to our previous excerpt from Catch-22 that I’ll leave it alone. Instead I’ll discuss (briefly) the passage’s remarkable word pictures.

“RICHARD NIXON” makes a metaphor with typeface; the rest of the sentence tells us that Nixon is to be equated with a train, but without the caps we imagine Nixon (flesh and blood) jogging over railroad ties. The capital letters impress the image of a train car, with great block letters on the side. They simultaneously inspire awe, quite similar to indignant nouns and adjectives in revolutionary pamphlets (INDIGNANT NOUNS and ADJECTIVES).

The second picture is aural: “this churning engine that knew-that-it-could (rack-it-ty-tack), knew it would (racky-rack).” Wills turns an ethic into an image by way of parenthetical ideophones; the phrase is the sound, and the sound, in turn, is the engine. It’s imperfect onomatopoeia; imperfect only because Wills resorts to nonsense words to get the sound he needs (racky-rack). As a classics Ph.D., Wills must have known perfect onomatopoeia, and perhaps bemoaned its difficulty in English. The technique (conveying the sense of words by their sounds) was named by the Greeks and brought to perfection, I think, by the Romans. One of the most beautiful passages from The Aeneid goes:

Hunc circum innumerae gentes populique volabant,
ac velut in pratis ubi apes aestate serena
floribus insidunt variis et candida circum
lilia funduntur, strepit omnis murmure campus.

You think Wills did well to fit two word-pictures in one paragraph? Virgil packed three word-pictures in two lines of poetry. You need to read Latin to spot the first two (they’re visual, and slightly more subtle than RICHARD NIXON), but anyone can appreciate the last one, a picture in sounds: strepit omnis murmure campus. Say it aloud several times, maybe with a little bit of an Italian accent, like this:

strepit om-nis mur-mur-ay cam-pus.

(That’s where the accents fall in the line’s meter… just trust me here.) Can you guess what Virgil is describing? Here’s a hint: om, mur, cam… hum, hum, hum… buzz, buzz, buzz…

Bees! “The whole field hums with the murmur.”

Garry Wills probably was probably thinking more of Watty Piper than the poet Virgil while he was writing knew-that-it-could; but I suggest the classics connection because I don’t think Wills could have written that paragraph without the heightened sensitivity to language that comes with an education in ancient tongues. In my opinion, the best thing a writer of English can do, besides read English and write English, is to study Latin; to spend a little time with each word on the page; to comprehend the combined effects of their sound, order, and origin; and lastly to use that understanding to compose elegant, imaginative English.

The writer of a book’s preface may expect a measure of deference from his readers, since, having yet to read the pages marked by Arabic rather than Roman numerals, the reader has no idea what the preface writer is talking about. Unlike traditional essays, prefaces may therefore indulge in poetry; that is, they may explore connections without qualifications, and cast their imagery over the volume like a stained-glass window illuminating an open hymnal. I wish I owned an anthology of great prefaces; if I were in charge of compiling one, I would include Christopher Morley’s introduction to The Essays of Francis Bacon. It begins:

Chance has it that the table where I write this is covered by a sheet of glass. Through my sleeves I feel the chill of that cold slippery stuff. How I would prefer to dictate, for none can match the written words of Lord Bacon. Only the humble working impromptu of live speech could stand up to that dark angel of English prose. It would be less wary than this, but more manly. Yet I feel, or have persuaded myself, that this cold plate under my elbows is somehow appropriate.

There is chill in the Essays too. It runs up the arms, it leaves one a little sick and shaken. Perhaps nowhere in literature do we more clearly see a Mind at work, and it frightens us. My Lord’s Northern Lights burn and steam like dry ice; our reason is thrilled, but also (in his own words) we find we are ‘full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to ourselves.’…

I am full of admiration for this passage. Like a good newspaper article (Morley was a reporter), it starts with a fact that begs a question: the fact being, the author’s table is covered in glass; the question being, who the hell cares?

This mystery pulls us through the author’s apology for taking on so great a subject, and on to the second paragraph where our answer is. I like the technique; if the preface had begun, “How I would prefer to dictate, for none can match the written words of Lord Bacon,” I would have thought, “Then why waste my time with this admittedly inferior preface?” and flipped through to the essays. But now I have to know why the glass is important.

Aha! The cold! The metaphor grabs you. “It runs up the arms, it leaves one a little sick and shaken.” No one can read that sentence and retain the heart to enforce the traditional prohibition against run-ons. “Northern Lights” is uncommonly witty: it continues the frigid theme, and in two words speaks to Bacon’s rarity, sublimity, and iridescence. The preface then segues into quoting bits of Bacon, each preserved in Morley’s magnificent frozen conceit, an aurora in its own right. Shortly after the ellipsis in the passage above, he calls Bacon’s writing “icicle aphorisms,” “winter-talk by the fireside,” “iced vermouth,” and—in a clause so elegant Morley had to crack it in half—”frostfires of beauty that coruscate—even against his will—in the arch of his arctic sky.”

The ice metaphor is, perhaps, overextended; one wonders whether Morley thought of every English word related to frozen water and made it a game to pack them into one paragraph. But they are all part of a larger design, not apparent in those first two paragraphs, nor in the middling paragraphs, which are altogether devoid of references to coldness. It is the final paragraph, simply written (no frostfires or coruscations), where the metaphor is fully realized, made affecting by its connection with the memorable beginning. Morley concludes his preface to Bacon thus:

As I write this it is snowing; one remembers the legend that a spring snowstorm killed him. He died as he lived, in a practical zeal for exact knowledge. To learn whether refrigeration really arrests decay he went outdoors to buy a drawn fowl and stuff it with snow. Maybe the Essays have kept so well, and will keep forever, for that same reason. Their entrails are packed with ice.