Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,

The time, when in our childish plays,

My sister Emmeline and I,

Together chased the butterfly.

A very hunter did I rush 

Upon the prey; with leaps and springs,

I followed on from brake to bush;

And she, God love her, feared to brush

The dust from off its wings.

All round, in hollow or on height;
Nor shout nor whistle strikes his ear;
What is the creature doing here?

He rides over the water and over the snow,
Through woods and through valleys, and over the height 

Which the goat cannot climb, takes his sounding flight; 

He tosses about in every bare tree,
As, if you look up, you plainly may see;
But how he will come, and whither he goes,
There’s never a scholar in England knows.

How great is God Almighty 

Who has made all things well.

Dutch Courage versus Courage.

I have been, and am still, a student; your struggles and difficulties have also been mine. In your hours of despondency it may perhaps help you to know that not even a glimmer of success ever came to remove the gloom except alter years of persistent struggle, I hold the belief that it is not for man to complain of circumstances, but bravely to accept, to confront and dominate them. I know that what has been done before will be accomplished again, and that the past will not remain merely as a dream. (Sir J. C. Bose.)

Paraphrase.

My life has been, and still is, that of a student, and so I have had to go through hard experiences like yours. You may be helped when I tell you that even my smallest success was only attained by years of constant struggle. I maintain that we should not find fault with the conditions in which we live; we must boldly face those conditions and make ourselves the masters of our fate. I am sure that what men have done men will do again, and that any greatness of the past can be again realised.

Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best 

All things both great and small;
For the dear Lord who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Paraphrase.

One who really loves his fellow beings and the birds and animals can pray well. One who loves all creatures better than anyone else does, prays better than any one else. For God who loves us made and loves every creature there is.

(Here you see how the older forms prayeth and loveth are changed into the modern forms prays and loves.)

With her five children small,
And, what is worse for Mother still,
I’m the oldest of them all.

Though little I be yet I fear not work
If you will me employ
To plough and sow, and reap and mow
And be a farmer’s boy.

Paraphrase.

My father is dead, and Mother is left with five little ones; and what is worse for Mother is that the others are younger than I. But though I am not a big boy, I am not afraid of any work you may give me, whether ploughing or sowing, reaping or mowing, if only you will let me be a farmer’s boy to you.

(Here you see how to turn inverted passages back to ordinary speech. Five children small becomes five little ones and Though little I be becomes though I am not a big boy.)

For every evil under the sun;

There is a remedy under the sun.

When unhappy try to find it;

If you cannot, never mind it.

Paraphrase.

Everything that is wrong can be put right. If you are unhappy, try to get rid of your unhappiness. If you can’t, don’t worry about it.

Here you see that repetition should be avoided. It is not necessary to say under the sun (= in the world).

# If you are given a passage of verse to paraphrase you must remember the following things. 

# Verse has a regular measure or rhythm, but prose has not. In verse a poet says:

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long, in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.

But in prose we should say:

There is someone who rides about all night long when it is dark and wet and windy.

# To fill up the required number of syllables poetry often repeats things, but prose need not do that. You have an example in the passage above.

# Poetry often inverts the order of words, or the prose order of subject and predicate. In the above example the subject comes in the last line. In the prose paraphrase it comes at the beginning.

# Poetry often uses unfamiliar words, or older words, forms and expressions which are no longer in use. These should be changed for modern ones.

# Poetry is often very brief, and says in a line more than prose can. So sometimes in a paraphrase we have to expand a passage of verse in order to explain it.

If you are asked to paraphrase a passage of prose, remember the following things.

# Difficult words or sentences should be written in simpler language, such as you would use If you were telling your brother or sister the meaning.

# Direct speech can be put into indirect form, and indirect speech into direct.

# Figures of speech such as similes and metaphors can be turned into plain language.

Rewrite the following passage of dialogue in paragraphs:

‘Tell us a story!’ said the March Hare. ‘Yes, please do!’ pleaded Alice. ‘And be quick about it,’ added the Hatter, ‘or you’ll be asleep again before it’s done.’ ‘Once upon a time there were three little sisters’, the Dormouse began in a great hurry; ‘and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tilly; and they lived at the bottom of a well—’. ‘What did they live on?’ asked Alice, who always took great interest in questions of eating and drinking. ‘They lived on treacle’, said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. ‘They couldn’t have done that, you know’, Alice gently remarked; ‘they’d have been ill’. ‘So they were’, said the Dormouse, 'very ill’. Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: ‘But why did they live at the bottom of a well?’ ‘Take some more tea’, the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. ‘I’ve had nothing yet’, Alice replied in an offended tone, so I can’t take more.’ ‘You mean you can’t take less’, said the Hatter: ‘It’s very easy to lake more than nothing. ‘Nobody asked your opinion’, said Alice. ‘Who’s making personal remarks now?’ the Hatter asked triumphantly. Alice did not quite know what to say to this, so she turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question: ‘Why did they live at the bottom of a well?’ The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said: ‘It was a treacle-well.’ ‘There’s no such thing!’ Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went: ‘Sh! sh!’ and the Dormouse sulkily remarked: ‘If you can’t be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.’

Arrange the following old Irish legend into paragraphs:—

Many years ago there, was a very religious and holy man, one of the monks of a convent, and he was one day kneeling at his prayers in the garden of his monastery when he heard a little bird singing in one of the rose-trees of the garden, and there never was anything that he had heard in the world so sweet as the song of that little .bird. The holy man rose up from his knees where he was. kneeling at his prayers to listen to its song; for he thought he never in all his life heard anything so heavenly. And the little bird, after singing for some time longer on the rose-tree, flew away to a grove at some distance from the monastery, and the holy man followed it to listen to its singing, for he felt as if he would never be tired of listening to the sweet song it was singing out of its throat. Then the little bird went away to another distant tree and sang there for a while, and then to another tree, and so on in the same manner, but ever farther and farther away from the monastery, and the holy man still followed it farther, and farther, and farther, still listening delighted to its enchanting song. But at last he was obliged to give up, as it was growing late in the day, and he returned to the convent. As he approached it in the evening the sun was setting in the west with all the most heavenly colours that were ever seen in the world, and when he came into the convent it was nightfall. He was quite surprised at everything he saw, for they were all strange faces about him in the monastery and the very place itself, and everything about it, seemed to be strangely altered. Altogether, it seemed entirely different from what it was when he had left in the morning; and the garden was not like the garden where he had been kneeling at his devotions when he first heard the singing of the little bird.

    Sir Rash Behari Ghosh had a wonderful memory. They say that, if you confronted him with any witness whom he had cross-examined, it might be twenty years before, in a minute or two he "would tell you the man’s name, the name of his native village, the case he appeared in, on what side, and what questions in cross-examination he himself had put to him. Incredible? Truth-speaking men have told me it verily was so. I believed them.

    When you put a kettle full of water on the fire and the water boils, you will see bubbles rising to the surface. That is because when the fire makes the kettle hot, the heat makes the air that is in the water expand, and the air escapes to the top in bubbles. These bubbles are little bags of water with air inside. These bags of hot air are made at the bottom of the kettle. Then they rise till the surface of the water is one mass of bubbles.

It is a fine thing to see an express train far down the line, coming towards you like a swift dragon! The smoke trails back flat over the great boiler. The engine grows bigger and bigger; then it bursts through the station with a tremendous roar. It is huge, a green and black monster of metal, and the station shakes as though there were an earthquake, and there is such a rush of wind that you feel you are going to be blown off your feet. The coaches and the restaurant car and the mail wagon rush by, and in a minute the train is a mile away, getting smaller and smaller in the distance.