Arcadia - “Brooksmith”
The narrator enlightens, “We are scattered now, the friends of the late Mr. Oliver Offord; but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a certain esoteric respect for each other. "Yes, you too have been in Arcadia," we seem not too grumpily to allow.” Here, Arcadia is emblematic of a proverbial friendship. Mr. Offord’s departure does not shake his surviving friends’ retention of Arcadia because they perceived it on each occasion they visited Mr. Oliver Offord. This Arcadia epitomizes all the momentous remembrances that they had at Mr. Oliver Offord’s house.
Prime minister - “Brooksmith”
The speaker clarifies, “Brooksmith was his butler and his most intimate friend, to whom we all stood, or I should say sat, in the same relation in which the subject of the sovereign finds himself to the prime minister.” The emblematic prime minister proposes that the connection between Mr. Oliver Offord and Brooksmith was beyond the Butler-Boss relationship. Brooksmith was substantial in Offord’s existence, and vice versa.
Hand - “The Altar of the Death”
James Henry expounds, “It (Mary Antrim’s death) took hold of him again and again with a hand of which time had softened but never loosened the touch.” Here, Henry James personifies death by assigning it spellbinding hands that have the potential of regulating George Stransom’s all-inclusive being. The figurative hand conjectures that George Stransom does not recuperate psychologically from the wounds prompted by Mary Antrim’s expiry.
