Study and Discussion

1. What is the general atmosphere of the essay? Does it change throughout the text? Account for these changes. What words and stylistic devices help the author to create the atmosphere?

2. What does Twain say he has acquired over his years as a riverboat pilot? What does he say he lost?

3. Speak on the author’s emotions. Do they change throughout the essay? Study the choice of words expressing emotions.

4. Find several details of color in Twain’s description of his first view of sunset on the river.

5. Choose four details from Twain’s first description of the sunset on the river, and explain how they reveal the poetry he once saw in it.

6. Explain how the experienced pilot’s view of each of these four details contrasts with Twain’s earlier view.

7. What attitudes or stages of life do the two views of the river represent? What value can you find in each view that the other lacks? Why does the author “pity doctors from his heart”?

8. Do you agree with Twain that romance – the first “view of the river” – must “die with youth”? Or do you feel that it is possible to hold onto both views at the same time? Explain.

Exercises and Assignments

I. Speak on the syntactical structure of the sentences throughout the essay. What syntactical means does the author use to sound emotional and expressive? Do you think the long sentences used by the author give a heavy ponderous effect?

II. What vocabulary do the words wrought and yonder belong to? What role do they play in the description? Give their definitions.

III. Study lexical stylistic devices prevailing in the text. Comment on the brightest examples explaining the functions of the tropes. Have you managed to retain all of these devices in your translation?

IV. What effect do the rhetorical questions at the end of the essay produce? Is the ending expressive and effective? What conclusion can you make for yourself after reading “Two Views of the River”?

V. Translate the following set expressions. Supply the context for these expressions from the essay:

from one’s heart, far and near, to master the language.

VI. Match each of the words in the first column with a suitable definition from the second column and give their translation.

1) unwholesome	a) a feeling of intense pleasure or joy
2) rapture	b) a sandbank or shoal at the mouth of a harbor, bay, or estuary
3) log	c) be a source of; provide
4) bar	d) a branch of a tree
5) acquisition	e) cause to appear or spread
6) bough	f) not characterized by or conducive to health or moral well-being
7) sow	g) a part of the trunk or a large branch of a tree that has fallen or been cut off
8) furnish	h) the learning or developing of a skill, habit, or quality

VII. Match each word from the first column with an antonym from the second column. Use these words in the sentences of your own.

1) cease 2) rippled 3) sombre 4) acquisition 5) conspicuous 6) trifling 7) restore 8) enrich 9) bewitched

a) impoverish b) significant c) indifferent d) begin e) slick f) bright g) loss h) hidden i) take away

VIII. Paraphrase the following sentences from Twain’s essay.

1. Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.

2. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture.

3. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them.

4. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.

IX. Fill in the gaps choosing a suitable word from the synonymic row. Change the grammatical form of a word where necessary.

Blaze, glare, glow, flare

1. The sun _________ down upon them with a crushing violence (Forester). 2. He lighted a cigarette and then remembered that the _________ of the match could probably be seen from the station (Anderson). 3. He lets the fire _________ on the sullen face for a moment, and it sears itself into the memory forever (Lowell). 4. The fire that burned within him, that _________ with so strange and marvelous radiance in almost all he wrote (Huxley).

Marvel, miracle, wonder

1. Chinese painters are not absorbed in expressing their sensuous delight in the _________ and glory of the world (Binyon). 2. The Roman army was still strong, and was to remain for centuries one of the _________ of the world (Buchan). 3. It was a _________ of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice! (Coleridge).

Allure, attract, bewitch, charm, fascinate

1. …talking, in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress, to Papa, who had begun to be _________ rather against his will (Woolf). 2. The prospect of an interesting, vivid life _________ many young women to the big cities (Ascham). 3. Cyril, having taken a fancy to his brilliant aunt, had tried to _________ her as he seldom or never tried to _________ his mother (Bennett). 4. The younger and weaker man was _________ and helpless before the creeping approach of so monstrous a wrath (Brown). 5. Heavens grant that Warwick’s words _________ him not! (Shakespeare).

Cease, discontinue, desist, stop, quit

1. I gave commands; then all smiles _________ together (Browning). 2. A few came, straggling and reluctant and not all constant: most _________ after the first day (Pynchon). 3. The English abstracts that were formerly printed in Russian technical periodicals have been _________ (Gardner). 4. He had made two attempts to shave but his hand had been so unsteady that he had been obliged to _________ (Joyce). 5. You hear the granting roar begin, and _________, and then again begin (Arnold).

Fashion, manner, mode, system, way

1. The reasons given do not seem very plausible to our _________ of thought (Binyon). 2. The mathematician is not capable of giving a reason in the same _________ as dialectician (Jowett). 3. Sally used to answer Robert’s letters, sadly and patiently, and with no reproaches; – that was Sally’s _________ (Deland). 4. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my _________ (Dowson). 5. His manners, his speech and habits of thought all seemed so prescribed, so intricately connected to one another that they suggested a _________ of conduct (Cheever).