Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare _has_
to use the abstract noun 'concealment,' on an instant it turns into a
visible worm 'feeding' on the visible rose; how, having to use a second
abstract word 'patience,' at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.

Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have
written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim--to prefer the
concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the
definite to the vague--as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on
it. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke
(prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to
scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by
setting a passage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"
alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham's "Inquiry into
the Policy of the European Powers." Here is the deadly parallel:--

BURKE.

In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the
extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Ægypt and
Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion
in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism
itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience
as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and
the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is