Balance, as an obvious way of marking a comparison or a contrast, is so familiar in every language and in every period as hardly to be thought of as a figure. It becomes a figure by becoming a preoccupation; and the preoccupation, evident in certain modern literary periods, has never been stronger than in sophistic. The sophists pursued balance with such zeal as to display its typical faults of padding and superficiality. A habit of balance tends to slip in here and there a makeweight of mere words, or to force the sense into the form. Over-balancing, sophistic shows abundantly, invites false balance. It is the way not to precision, but to epigram. Description of the several forms of balance distinguished by sophistic cannot go far without examples. The only sufficient examples must be sought in Greek and Latin; for the sophistic refinements often depend upon the recurrence of inflections or upon transpositions possible only in a language that is highly inflected. Modern languages depend so much less on inflection that they chime less readily and can transpose for symmetry sometimes only by more conspicuous violation of normal sentence order. Nevertheless some of the sophistic forms of balance, with other figures of words, can be exhibited accurately, and the character and effect of them all can be generally suggested, by English examples. Both the charm and the danger of the ancient figures are exemplified by De Quincey in what he called “impassioned prose.” De Quincey’s encomium _Joan of Arc_, insistent in apostrophe, has one hyperbole that might have been uttered by Polemo or Scopelian. “The graves that had closed sixty years ago seemed to fly open in sympathy with a sorrow that echoed their own.” His alliteration, too, often suggests the same anxiety to enhance. In the ecphrasis on the forest and fountain of Domrémy (paragraph 12), and again in the corresponding one toward the close, he is more delicate. On the other hand he uses with sophistic fondness the device of a carrying iteration. The encomium opens: What is to be thought of _her_? What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that—like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judea—rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration rooted deep in pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings?[79] An even more marked example is the paragraph next to the last. Its opening and its close are as follows: