Remove thou yonder scull out from the scattered heaps. Is that a temple,
where a God may dwell? Why, even the worm at last disdains her shattered
cell! Look thou on its broken arch, and look thou on its ruined wall,
and on its desolate chambers, and on its foul portals:--yes, this scull
was once ambition's airy hall; (_it was_) the dome of thought, the
palace of the soul. Behold thou, through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
the gay recess of wisdom and of wit, and passion's host, which never
brooked control. Can all the works which saints, or sages, or sophists
have ever written, repeople this lonely tower, or can they refit this
tenement?
For your future exercises in parsing, you may select pieces from the
English Reader, or any other grammatical work. I have already hinted,
that parsing in poetry, as it brings more immediately into requisition
the reasoning faculties, than parsing in prose, will necessarily tend
more rapidly to facilitate your progress: therefore it is advisable that
your future exercises in this way, be chiefly confined to the analysis
of poetry. Previous to your attempting to parse a piece of poetry, you
ought always to transpose it, in a manner similar to the examples just
presented; and then it can be as easily analyzed as prose.
Before you proceed to correct the following exercises in false syntax,
you may turn back and read over the whole thirteen lectures, unless you
have the subject-matter already stored in your mind.
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