Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Metaphor
"This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market."
Thoreau uses metaphor to help the reader understand the correlation between how often "real literature" is read verses how often "trashy books" are read.
Rhetorical Question
"Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book?"
"Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Reading & Co. to select our reading?"
"If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the work at once?"
Thoreau includes rhetorical questions to lead the reader to certain conclusion and makes them see they way the author wants them to see.
Alliteration
"... to all in any age."
"...equable and elligable event"
Alliteration is used to draw the reader's attention to that particular line which in turn, empahsizes the text in that line.
Anaphora
"In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or aquiring fame even, we are mortal; in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident."
Thoreau uses anaphora to maximize the effect how we act as mortals as opposed to human's immortal qualities.
Asyndeton
"As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture- genius, learning, wit, books, paintings, statuary, music, philosophical instruments, the like; so let the villages do..."
The use of asyndeton works to dramatize the sentence by eliminating conjunctions to quicken the speed, pace.
Polysyndeton
"... out of what wisdom and valor and generosity and kindness we have."
"We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate."
Polysyndeton works to give power to the words around the conjunctions and makes the reader feel like the ideas presented are building up.