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I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church those of bishop and pastor.
In this curious divergence from established rules of verse Miss Dickinson may be likened to Walt Whitman, whom she differs from in every other particular, and notably in her pithiness as opposed to his diffuseness; but with her we feel in the strongest way that her mode is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation, posing, or self-consciousness.
When all is said and done, the clergy got a certain pithiness from that terrific habit they had of going back every little while and pinning down their thought with a text.
"He has never been surpassed in the editorial faculty, at the same time being apt as compositor, pressman, verse-maker, compiler and reporter; but as adviser, satirist and humorist he was perhaps at his best. His one and two line bits of comment and wisdom were models of pithiness, and few writers have equalled him in masterly skill in argument.
"They but preserve his ashes, thou his flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame," says, with his usual pithiness, "Too faithfully is indeed pedantically." In Dr. Prior's version of the "The Buried Mother" we find a case precisely in point. The Stepmother says to the poor Orphans, "In blind-house shall ye lie all night." Jamieson gives it, "Says, 'Ye sall ligg i' the mirk all night."
The very pithiness of it, so characteristic of the excellent but bigoted Omar, is enough to cast suspicion upon it. De Quincey tells us that "if a saying has a proverbial fame, the probability is that it was never said." How many amusing stories stand a chance of going down to posterity as the inventions of President Lincoln, of which, nevertheless, he is doubtless wholly innocent!
"The pithiness of your manner does not afford me much encouragement yet I will not be diverted from my purpose, even by that. "The plot thickens," said the ensign, somewhat sharply "both the husband and the wife. Jupiter Tonans and Juno the Superb in judgment upon poor me in succession. Ah! that is too bad. But seriously, Mrs.
The classic example is Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in The Duchess of Malfy. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant, staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often resulted in dense obscurity.
They have a proverb, the pithiness of which is much lost in this paraphrase, "No happiness without order, no order without authority, no authority without unity." The mildness of all government among them, civil or domestic, may be signalised by their idiomatic expressions for such terms as illegal or forbidden viz., "It is requested not to do so and so."
How these things promote terseness and pithiness of speech! I believe no one, unless it be the stockholders of one or two old lines, regrets that all telegraphic and telephonic communication in this country has been taken under the control of the government. Underground laying of telegraph wires is now nearly universal.
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