Writer’s feelings:
Part IV
“The thing became an obsession with me, and I could not let this nook of history alone.”
“I have gone there, worried and distraught, and returned at ease with the world.”
Part V
“(…) no hint anywhere of the strangeness which to me had made it a kind of sanctuary.”
Part VI
“I came to regard the Green Glen as my own exclusive property, which shared with me a secret. It was a pleasant intimacy, and I had resigned myself to the limits (…)
Figures of Speech
Part IV
“The place was silent and aware” (personification)
“(…) sooner or later they would ring up the curtain on the play” (idiom, metaphor)
“A needle in a haystack was a simple quest compared to mine.” (Idiom, exaggeration)
“History, which loves to leave fringes and loose threads, had cut the record of Home and Douglas with her sharpest shears”. (Metaphor, personification)
“He came to his end by a bullet (…)”
“(…) but history does not tell us of his fate.”(Personification)
“He left landless sons who disappear into the mist” (metaphor)
Part V
“(…) with my brain fagged and dull and my nerves a torment”. (Exaggeration)
“The Glen healed me, plunging me into the deeps of cool old-world shadows.”(Personification, metaphor)
“It stirred the blood, comforting failure and nursing hope, but it did not lull to sleep.”
“Food for neither man nor beast,” (metaphor)
Part VI
“(…) conscious that the curtain of the past was drawn too close to allow more than one little chink to be see.” (Metaphor)
“There he had a ready-made environment; here in England he had to make his own, and he did not seem to have the knack of it.” (metaphor)
“He was hopelessly shy and curiously unimpressionable.” (Exaggeration)
Historical references
Covenant
National Covenant, solemn agreement inaugurated by Scottish churchmen on Feb. 28, 1638, in the Greyfriars’ churchyard, Edinburgh. It rejected the attempt by King Charles I and William Laud,...