MEASUREMENTS

MEASUREMENTS
THE artistic writer seldom finds it necessary, at least in literature, to declare measures of time, magnitude, distance, etc. , in the Fact way. He understands that hours and tons and feet and years mean little or nothing to a reader, and that appeal must be made to the feelings if readers are at all to grasp duration of time, volume of matter, or extent of distance. Therefore when he has facts of this kind to make known he uses the Figurative or the Detail manner of expression; for these forms make facts known by way of the feelings, by making the reader undergo imaginatively the experience necessary to learn the fact. 
Hawthorne, when writing of the width of the Concord river near the Old Manse, might have given its width in feet, a hundred, perhaps; he chose, however, to make the distance felt, and he wrote, "The stream has here about the breadth of twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm, —a space not too wide when bullets were whistling across. " So Tennyson, wishing the reader to understand how long the Prince was wandering in the garden, appeals thus, in "The Princess, " to the feelings:
And, tost on thoughts that changed from hue to hue, Now poring on the glowworm, now the star, 
I paced the terrace, till the Bear had wheel'd Thro' a great arc his seven slow suns. 
One who has watched at all the movement of the con 
stellation known as the Great Bear, or the Dipper, willappreciate to no small degree the length of time required for it to pass through a "great arc, " and will also be forced to realize something of the monotony and weariness of the slow-paced hours. 
In "The House of the Seven Gables" Hawthorne uses such suggestive measurement terms as the following:
An elm-tree of wide circumference. 
The principal entrance . . . had almost the breadth of a church door. 
When Phcebe awoke—which she did with the early twittering
of the conjugal couple of robins in the pear-tree—she heard movements below stairs. 
It seemed as if for Everyone of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the air, humming-birds; a thumb's bigness of burnished plumage, hovering and vibrating about the bean-poles. 
Nor was it out of keeping . . . that the son should be willing to earn an honest penny, or rather a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse of his father's deadly enemy. 
Richard Jefferies, in his charming and restful nature pictures in prose, relies continually for measurement upon terms addressed to the feelings. The following suggest the originality of his expressions:
The vast avenues, a rifle-shot across, such as the Avenue de l'Opera. . . . 
It was between the may [hawthorne blossom] and the rose. Smooth round stems of angelica, big as a gun garrel, hollow and strong, stood on the slope of the mound. 
But the "gix, " or wild parsnip, . . . would rear its fluted stalk, joint on joint, till it could face a man. 
John Fiske, in one of his historical essays, instead of saying four hundred and fifty years, writes of "the deadly Inquisition, working quietly and steadily year after year while fourteen generations lived and died. " Another author speaks of "cubes of stone, each as big as two pianos, "
and of derricks which look "in the distance like knitting needles" but which are in reality "twice the size of one's body. "
Even in the most prosaic Descriptions, intended primarily to convey facts, one finds that feet and tons and miles are of slight value. In parts of the country where travel may be difficult it is much more accurate to say that a place is so many hours distant than to say it is so many miles. In like manner to say that a great steamship would fill Forbes street from the Schenley Hotel to the Carnegie Library means much more to the Pittsburg reader than to declare its six or seven hundred feet of length. To say that the great Manufactures building at the Columbian Exposition was about 1, 700 feet long and 800 feet wide gives no idea of its size. To say that in most cities it would cover a space seven blocks long and three blocks wide means much more. To say that it would seat a hundred times as many people as the largest theatre or hall in the country helps one somewhat to comprehend its magnitude, as it does to tell that to walk around it was to traverse a distance only a few feet less than a mile. While the world was visiting this building, a great firm was advertising that annually it manufactured more tons of chocolate than the building weighed, a statement that almost took a reader's breath. 
Such illustrations are of course without literary flavor. A writer, however, should always aim to make his statements so clear that they must be understood by all, and to do this he must ever keep in mind that comparisons with things known are much more effective than exact terms of measurement. 
1. She . . . 
Sang to the stillness, till the mountain shade
Sloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff. —Tennyson. 
2. Although I lingered there till every daisy slept. 
3. The primrose was not yet gone, the swallow had not yet come, and the young grass under the feet of the oxen was still small and sweet, when Thorkell's wife took to her bed. —Hall Caine. 
4. The new Ballamona began to gather a musty odor, and the old Ba, llamona took the moss on its wall and the lichen on its roof. —Ibid. 
5. But his father was scarcely cold in his grave, the old sea tub that took his brother across the Channel had hardly grounded at Liverpool, when Thorkell Mylrea offered his heart and wrinkled hand, and the five hundred acres of Ballamona, to a lady twenty years of age. —Ibid. 
6. He show'd a tent a stone-shot off. —Tennyson. 
7. Wroth, but all in awe, 
For twenty strokes of the blood, without a word, 
Linger'd that other, staring after him. —Ibid. 
8. A large part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed house, one beside another. —Stevenson. 
9. "His father' he told me, is a fine man, —a giant, who has trouble in getting through doors. "—De Amicis in "Cuore. "
10. Here is the first snow! Ever since yesterday evening it has been falling . in thick flakes as large as gillyflowers. —Ibid. 
11. Three days and three nights on that wonderful river Parana, in comparison with which our great Po is but a rivulet; and the length of Italy quadrupled does not equal that of its course. —Ibid. 
12. The Austrians had approached still nearer: their contorted faces were already visible through the smoke. —Ibid. 
13. It took its name from the great red stain, as big as a blanket, which appeared on the huge bowlder in the grove, at the far end of the Red Rock gardens. —Thomas Nelson
14. The bones of the legs of this prehistoric freak, now in Carnegie Museum, are big enough to serve as railroad ties. —Newspaper Paragraph. 
15. The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many things grow irksome by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. 
16. The dining-room was not much favored by the water but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling treetops, that rose to it from a tiny garden ground, no bigger than a pocket-handkerchief. —W. D. Howells.
Category: Description