THE ANALYSIS OF SENTENCES
We are now ready to analyze sentences containing adjective clauses,
noun clauses, and adverbial clauses of time, place, and manner.
It frequently happens that there is a clause within a clause. The first
clause is then to be treated as if it were a complex sentence, and
the second clause analyzed when the rest of the first clause has been
disposed of. In the sentence,--“He felt as if he would like to stay
till every ship that had sailed out of Monterey in the last three years
had returned,” the predicate contains a clause of manner introduced by
_as if_ and extending to the end of the sentence. In this modal clause
the infinitive _to stay_ is modified by a temporal clause introduced
by _till_ and extending to the end of the sentence. In this temporal
clause the base-word of the subject, _ship_, is modified by the
restrictive adjective clause introduced by the relative pronoun _that_
and extending through the word _years_. So we have an adjective clause
within a temporal clause which is within a modal clause.
Exercise 12
Analyze the following sentences.
1. Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept.--_Carlyle._
2. We’ll go where on the rocky isles
Her eggs the screaming sea fowl piles
Beside the pebbly shore.--_Bryant._
3. Where’er the impatient Switzers gazed,
The unbroken line of lances blazed.--_Montgomery._
4. The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante, as the
hieroglyphics of Egypt differed from the picture-writing of
Mexico.--_Macaulay._
5. Natural talent and genius tell in elocution, as they do in the
other arts.
6. Seventy years elapsed before the papacy was restored to the Eternal
City.--_Draper._
7. No instrument of man’s devising can reach the heart as does that
most wonderful instrument, the human voice.--_Hart._
8. But soon a funeral hymn was heard
Where the soft breath of evening stirred
The tall, gray forest.--_Longfellow._
9. Ever since Mr. Hobart’s “eleven and a bit” was left on the kitchen
bed, Jess had hungered for a cloak with beads.--_Barrie._
10. I was coming in, one summer night, from a long walk in the
country, when I met this apparition at the city gate.--_H. James._
11. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches
on a journey.--_Bagehot._
12. Scarcely was the artillery got into position when a rapid fire was
opened on it from the tower.
13. As Venice in winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the
world, so in spring it is the fullest of joy and light.--_Howells._
14. Where population is sparse, discussion is difficult.
15. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up their
reports at two or three o’clock in the morning, and fill out the
speeches to suit themselves.--_Holmes._
16. The German built his solitary hut where inclination
prompted.--_Motley._
17. But when the old cathedral bell
Proclaimed the morning prayer,
The white pavilions rose and fell
On the alarmèd air.--_Longfellow._
18. How fine a thing it would be if all the faculties of the mind
could be trained for the battles of life as a modern nation makes
every man a soldier.--_J. L. Allen._
19. We wish that whosoever, in all coming time, shall turn his eye
hither, may behold that the place is not undistinguished, where the
first great battle of the Revolution was fought.--_Webster._
20. As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable
races that have worked over the juices of earth and air into organic
life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that
nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of every
remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the decay of a
long succession of forgotten ones.--_Lowell._