Get ready the bats and take your positions.  Now, give us the ball.  Too low.  Don’t strike.  Too high.  Don’t strike.  There it comes like lightning.  Strike!  Away it soars!  Higher!  Higher!  Run!  Another base!  Faster!  Faster!  Good!  All around at one stroke!

Observe the remarkable way in which the lecturer fused speaker, audience, spectators, and players into one excited, ecstatic whole—­just as you have found yourself starting forward in your seat at the delivery of the ball with “three on and two down” in the ninth inning.  Notice, too, how—­perhaps unconsciously—­Talmage painted the scene in Homer’s characteristic style:  not as having already happened, but as happening before your eyes.

If you have attended many travel talks you must have been impressed by the painful extremes to which the lecturers go—­with a few notable exceptions, their language is either over-ornate or crude.  If you would learn the power of words to make scenery, yes, even houses, palpitate with poetry and human appeal, read Lafcadio Hearn, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, and Edmondo De Amicis.

Blue-distant, a mountain of carven stone appeared before them,—­the Temple, lifting to heaven its wilderness of chiseled pinnacles, flinging to the sky the golden spray of its decoration.

    —­LAFCADIO HEARN, Chinese Ghosts.

The stars were clear, colored, and jewel-like, but not frosty.  A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way.  All around me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still.  By the whiteness of the pack-saddle I could see Modestine walking round and round at the length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not another sound save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones.

    —­ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Travels with a Donkey.

It was full autumn now, late autumn—­with the nightfalls gloomy, and all things growing dark early in the old cottage, and all the Breton land looking sombre, too.  The very days seemed but twilight; immeasurable clouds, slowly passing, would suddenly bring darkness at broad noon.  The wind moaned constantly—­it was like the sound of a great cathedral organ at a distance, but playing profane airs, or despairing dirges; at other times it would come close to the door, and lift up a howl like wild beasts.

    —­PIERRE LOTI, An Iceland Fisherman.

I see the great refectory,[22] where a battalion might have drilled; I see the long tables, the five hundred heads bent above the plates, the rapid motion of five hundred forks, of a thousand hands, and sixteen thousand teeth; the swarm of servants running here and there, called to, scolded, hurried, on every side at once; I hear the clatter of dishes, the deafening noise, the voices choked with food crying out:  “Bread—­bread!” and I feel once more the formidable appetite, the herculean strength of jaw, the exuberant life and spirits of those far-off days.[23]

    —­EDMONDO DE AMICIS, College Friends.