Fourth paragraph — striking occasions.

221. Summary of Striking Occasions. The parts of a book which we recall with least mental effort long after reading it are particular occasions —sometimes called scenes or situations—which have impressed us because of their intensely dramatic power. These are the portions that a playwright would use if he were dramatizing the book. The following quotations show how to treat these occa¬sions in an expository paragraph. In the first of the models they are merely enumerated ; in the sec¬ond each is briefly described.
MODELS
I.
"There is in Silas "Warner' a moderate amount of dramatic incident, the accusation and casting of lots in Lantern Yard, the quarrel of the Cass brothers, the dispute at the ale-house, the theft of the money, the
New-Year party, the coming of Eppie, the renunciation of her father in Marner's cottage, and the return visit to Lantern Yard. No one of these incidents is wildly exciting, it is true; but excitement is not one of the author's ambitions."
"But the most signIficant advance which this poem [`The Lady of the Lake] shows over earlier work is in the greater genuineness of the poetic effect. In the de¬scription, for example, of the approach of Roderick Dhu's boats to the island, there is a singular depth of race feeling. There is borne in upon us as we read, the realization of a wild and peculiar civilization ; we get a breath of poetry keen and strange, like the shrilling of the bagpipes across the water. Again, in the speeding of the fiery cross, there is a primitive depth of poetry which carries with it a sense of old, unhappy, far-off things '; it appeals to latent memories in us which have been handed down from an ancestral past. There is nothing in either The Lay of the Last Minstrel or Marmion to compare for natural dramatic force with the situation in The Lady of the Lake when Roderick Dhu whistles for his clansmen to appear, and the astonished Fitz- James sees the lonely mountain-side suddenly bristle with tartans and spears ; and the fight which follows at the ford is a real fight, in a sense not at all to be applied to the tournaments and other conventional encounters of the early poems. . . . This gain in subtlety of treatment will be made still more apparent by comparing with any supernatural episode in the 'Lay' the account in the 'Lady of the Lake' of the unearthly parentage of Brian the Hermit."
Exercises
I. Prove that the first sentence characterizes all the occasions, and that the last sentence summarizes the general impression they make. Point out the expressions that enforce the thought of the topic sentence.