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The casting of lots and similar random procedures have been common methods of divination the world over. The African Kafir diviner detects criminals by the fall of small objects used as dice. The Ashanti discover future events by the figures formed when palm wine is thrown on the ground, and from the nature of the numbers, whether even or odd, when one lets fall a handful of nuts.
The art of the chemist may discover perhaps the secret agent which tints the white flower with blue or pink, but very often the elements, which analysis detects, nature alone can combine. The analogy is not strained or fanciful when we apply it to a past society.
You open the door, but your curiosity is not repaid; the seedy friends who preceded you but an instant are lost to sight presto! the room is as vacant as a last year's robin's nest, and observation detects a hole of six inches in diameter in a door in one side of the room; you try the door, but it is fast, and you may leave if you wish, but the idea of a Copperhead crawling through a hole six inches in diameter will haunt your dreams that night.
In these thirty lines we have the preluding mutterings of the storm which was to sweep away mask and revel and song, to inhibit the drama, and suppress poetry. In the earlier poems Milton's muse has sung in the tones of the age that is passing away; the poet is, except in his austere chastity, a cavalier. Though even in L'Allegro Dr. Johnson truly detects "some melancholy in his mirth."
She had always been able, on entering a room full of people, to tell instinctively if anything was amiss, though whether her faculty was purely intuitional or merely the delicate functioning of a mental process she was unable to say, any more than a person suffering from "cat-fear" can tell how he detects the presence of the hidden cat, whether the warning comes out of the blue, or is the result of finely developed olfactory nerves.
In this sentiment of discontent there is a certain truthfulness, because it is an element of human nature, and how best to deal with it is a problem yet unsolved; but in the opinions and doctrines to which, among the masses, the sentiment gives birth, the wisdom of the wisest detects only the certainty of a common ruin, offering for reconstruction the same building-materials as the former edifice, materials not likely to be improved because they may be defaced.
The secret of the use of metaphor in the poet's art is, says the speaker, this. When the mind is at rest its surface is alive with vivid images which have settled on it like sea birds on a rock, but the moment any one of these detects an approach on our part, in order that we may examine it carefully, its wings are spread, and in a flash it is gone.
There had been no prodigies in earth or sky worthy of his advent. How could He be amongst them, and they unaware! But it was even so, and it is so still. The Christ is in us, and with us still. There may be no transcendent symptoms of his blessed presence, as He stands in the little groups of two and three gathered in his name; but the eye of faith detects Him.
"For whom are you wailing?" she asked feebly. "For your poor father," said the old woman. The girl smiled like a child who detects some well-meant deceit, and said: "Was not my father here, with you? He is here, in Thebes, and looked at me, and kissed me, and said that he is bringing home plunder, and that a good time is coming for you.
Macdonald says about a Being among the Yaos, analogous to the Dendid of the Dinkas, or the Darumulun of Australia, or the Huron Ahone. Yet analysis detects, in Mr. Macdonald's report, copious traces of such a Being, though Mr. Macdonald himself believes in ancestor-worship as the Source of the local religion.
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