apostrophe: a figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person, a personified abstraction, or sometimes an inanimate object. The effect may add emotional intensity or familiarity. For example, Walt Whitman addresses the assassinated Abraham Lincoln as "O Captain! my Captain!"
"Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is-though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence, with the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and Daguerreotypist, deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it is marvellously like it, and the more so for the ethereal and intangible quality, which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may! Murmur not-question not- but make the most of it!"
-The House of the Seven Gables
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
In this passage, Hawthorne, or the narrator, addressing Clifford directly, giving advice. However, Clifford is absent, he is not actually receiving the words, the reader is. Hawthorne does this for many reasons. He is communicating information to the reader this way. Through an apostrophe the information is more personal, even though the person the words were "intended" for is not present. This keeps with the romantic tone, and makes Clifford seem more pitiable. Also, the apostrophe foreshadows a looming event. The narrator advises Clifford to "enjoy it while it lasts" suggesting to the reader that something ominous is going to happen.
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