CHAPTER XII
THE ANALYSIS OF SENTENCES
We are now ready to analyze sentences containing adjective clauses, noun clauses, and adverbial clauses of time, place, and manner.
It frequently happens that there is a clause within a clause. The first clause is then to be treated as if it were a complex sentence, and the second clause analyzed when the rest of the first clause has been disposed of. In the sentence,—“He felt as if he would like to stay till every ship that had sailed out of Monterey in the last three years had returned,” the predicate contains a clause of manner introduced by as if and extending to the end of the sentence. In this modal clause the infinitive to stay is modified by a temporal clause introduced by till and extending to the end of the sentence. In this temporal clause the base-word of the subject, ship, is modified by the restrictive adjective clause introduced by the relative pronoun that and extending through the word years. So we have an adjective clause within a temporal clause which is within a modal clause.
Exercise 12
Analyze the following sentences.
1. Again Thor struck, so soon as Skrymir again slept.—Carlyle.
2.
3.
4. The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante, as the hieroglyphics of Egypt differed from the picture-writing of Mexico.—Macaulay.
5. Natural talent and genius tell in elocution, as they do in the other arts.
6. Seventy years elapsed before the papacy was restored to the Eternal City.—Draper.
7. No instrument of man’s devising can reach the heart as does that most wonderful instrument, the human voice.—Hart.
8.
9. Ever since Mr. Hobart’s “eleven and a bit” was left on the kitchen bed, Jess had hungered for a cloak with beads.—Barrie.
10. I was coming in, one summer night, from a long walk in the country, when I met this apparition at the city gate.—H. James.
11. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.—Bagehot.
12. Scarcely was the artillery got into position when a rapid fire was opened on it from the tower.
13. As Venice in winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring it is the fullest of joy and light.—Howells.
14. Where population is sparse, discussion is difficult.
15. These newspaper fellows are half asleep when they make up their reports at two or three o’clock in the morning, and fill out the speeches to suit themselves.—Holmes.
16. The German built his solitary hut where inclination prompted.—Motley.
17.
18. How fine a thing it would be if all the faculties of the mind could be trained for the battles of life as a modern nation makes every man a soldier.—J. L. Allen.
19. We wish that whosoever, in all coming time, shall turn his eye hither, may behold that the place is not undistinguished, where the first great battle of the Revolution was fought.—Webster.
20. As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have worked over the juices of earth and air into organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones.—Lowell.