208 LITERARY VALUES 



Some things and events in our daily experience are 

 more typical, and therefore more suggestive, than 

 others. Thus the sower striding across the ploughed 

 field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the 

 ■whole life of the husbandman, — his first-hand rela- 

 tion to things, his ploughing, his planting, his fer- 

 tilizing, his draining, his pruning, his grafting, his 

 uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the 

 wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat, 

 his fencing his field with the stones and boulders 

 that hindered his plough or cumbered his sward, his 

 making the wilderness blossom as the rose, — all 

 these things are pleasant to contemplate because in 

 them there is a story within a story, we translate 

 the facts into higher truths. 



In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the 

 seaman with his compass and rudder, the potter with 

 his clay, the weaver with his warp and woof, the 

 sculptor with his marble, the painter with his can- 

 vas and pigments, the builder with his plans and 

 scaffoldings, the chemist with his solvents and pre- 

 cipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and antisep- 

 tics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with 

 his text, the fisherman with his nets, — all are more 

 or less symbolical and appeal to the imagination. 



In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestive- 

 ness of language used in a vivid, imaginative way, 

 and the suggestiveness of words redolent of human 

 association, words of deep import, as friend, home, 

 love, marriage. 



To me Shakespeare's sonnets are the most sugges- 



