good author's meaning without those tools and that fire. Often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest fusing before you can gather one grain of the metal.
In the first place lay hold of the things used for illustrating the thought: The Australian miner as representing the reader; the pickaxes and shovels symbolical of the working tools; the metal compared to the author's mind, his words to the rock, the smelting-furnace to the thoughtful soul. Now we are prepared to see the picture which the simile produces, to grasp the thought, and to commit it to memory with ease.
By means of analogy (apposition) facts are readily recalled; as,
Andrew Johnson was the only president of the United States whom it was ever sought to impeach, and he escaped impeachment by one vote.
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