It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles are to be vindicated, and solemn truths told, when some moral or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric.
Hoar reflects on the occasions when powerful rhetoric is necessary in political discourse.
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We bring you a more costly and precious gift than any jewel or diadem, though it came from an Emperor's treasury.
We speak of a light that makes darkness visible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the long intervals of silence with which they alternate.
And the Greeks, in turn, owed their astronomy to the Egyptians, with whom the year was reckoned as of three hundred and sixty days; and this three hundred and sixty-day year gives us the clue to the forty-day period for holding the Forest…
The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness…
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