LONGEST SENTENCE IN LITERATURE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18406, 7 March 1928, Page 15

LONGEST SENTENCE IN LITERATURE.

WALT WHITMAN AS A WORLD'S CHAMPION. What is the longest sentence on record? The example from this year's Finance Act, consisting of 239 words, quoted recently, is certainly a “ stayer,” writes a correspondent in a London paper. It hardly qualifies for the long-distance championship, however. This, T imagine, must be held by Walt Whitman. In his “ Specimen Days in America,” there are three sentences at least which make the financial expert’s effort seem One of these Consists of no fewer than One of these cossists of no fewer than 395 words. (counting hyphenated words as one). Here it is:—The dead in this war—there they lie, Strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battlefields of the South— Virginia, the Peninsula—Malvern Hill and Fair Oaks—the banks of th'e Cickahoming—the terraces of Fredericksburgh—Antietam bridge—the grisly ravines of Manassas—the bloody promenade of the Wilderness—the varieties of the strayed dead (the estimate of the War Department is 25,000 national soldiers killed In battle and never buried at all, 5000 drown’d —15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march In haste, in hitherto unfound localities--—2OOO graves cover'd by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3000 carried away by cavingin of banks, etc.) —Qettysburgh, the West, Southwest—Vicksburgh—Chattanooga—the trenches of Petersburgh —the numberless battles, camps, hospitals, everywhere—the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations and blackest and loathsomest of all. the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, etc., (not Dante's pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy, torments, excel I’d those prisons)—the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all (all. all, all, finally dead to me)—or East or West— Atlantic Coast or Mississippi valley—somewhere they crawl’d to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills —(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach’d bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet)-r—our young men once so handsome and so joyous taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend-—the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinae, and in Tennessee—the single graves left, in the ' woods or by the road-side (hundreds, thousands, obliterated) —the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged (dozens, scores, floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee. following Gettysburgli)—some lie at the bottom of the sea —the general million and the special cemeteries in all the States—the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in von ire’s chemistry distill’d, and shall

ho so for ever, in every future grain of wheat or ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)—not only Northern leavening Southern soil—thousands, aye, tens of thousands of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.