As an accompaniment, perhaps as a consequence, of the tendency of the imagination to unify and harmonize its material by seeking always a deeper basis and a larger category, and the other tendency to use in literature the specific detail rather than the generalization, we have the fact of figurative thinking and speaking as a characteristic of this art. A figure involves the discovery of a striking or essential contrast or contradiction between objects, or the recognition of a likeness or affinity ranging in closeness from mere similarity to complete identification. Whichever be the process, the result is the universal and typical meanings of literature, its pleasing indirection of statement, its enlarged outlook upon many other spheres, the vista of suggestion and association opening in every direction, the surprised, the shocked or delighted recognitions, that await us on every page. We will pass by as mystical and not demonstrable the inviting theory that a contact with these contrasts and resemblances may put into the hands of the child a clue to the better arrangement of the fragments that compose his world, and may help on in him that process of unification and identification which is the paramount human task; we must leave out of sight here, as too speculative and unpractical, the enlargement and definition of his categories that would come to the child as it comes to everyone, with even the most elementary recognition of the fundamental separations and unions involved in figures; these we may leave aside, while we take the simple and quite obvious aspect of the matter--that the study and understanding of even the commoner figures quicken the child's intelligence, and help to develop mental alertness and certainty. Not even a sense of humor is so useful in his intellectual experience as the ability to understand and use figures of speech. What makes so pathetic or so appalling a spectacle as the person who never catches the transferred and ironic turns of expression of which even ordinary conversation is full? The poor belated mind stands helpless amidst the play of allusion that flashes all about him, and not even fear of thunder, which is the most alert sensation Emerson can attribute to him, can put him into touch with his kind. The best place to train a child toward quickness, the mental ease and adroitness that come of a ready understanding and use of figure is in literature, one of whose signal characteristics is the use of figure. The appreciation of remote and delicate figures will, of course, come later in a student's experience than the elementary years, after he has had more contact with life and the world and a much widened experience in literature. But the child who has been taught to understand and to use any of the simpler figures has been helped a long way on the road of art and philosophy.