Sense and Sensibility: Imagery 2 key examples

In a conversation early in the novel between Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne, Marianne uses imagery to describe her experience of Edward:

“Edward is very amiable, and I love him tenderly. But yet—he is not the kind of young man—there is a something wanting—his figure is not striking; it has none of that grace which I should expect in the man who could seriously attach my sister. His eyes want all that spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence.”

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In an unusually lyrical passage near the end of the novel, Austen uses imagery to capture the romantic way in which Marianne views the English countryside, and especially Cleveland, the house where she has just arrived with her family:

Marianne entered the house with a heart swelling with emotion from the consciousness of being only eighty miles from Barton, and not thirty from Combe Magna; and before she had been five minutes within its walls, while the others were busily helping Charlotte to show her child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again, stealing away through the winding shrubberies, now just beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence; where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over a wide tract of country to the south-east, could fondly rest on the farthest ridge of hills in the horizon, and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna might be seen.

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