Furthermore, addressing inanimate things, or persons not present, as if they could answer, is sometimes called apostrophe. The word suggests the turning from the natural course of the thought in order to do this. For example:

1. Ye principalities and powers,

That never tasted death! Witness from off your heavenly towers Our act of Christian faith.

2. Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee.

Exercise

442. Are the following examples of personification or of apostrophe?

1. Farewell, happy fields,

Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors, hail! And thou, profoundest hell!

2. Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth And Melancholy marked him for her own.

3. Advance, then, ye future generations! We would hail you, as you rise in your long succession, to fill the places which we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our own human duration. We bid you welcome to this pleasant land of the fathers.