you fail to express yourself in prose. Verse
should glide full-winged over the surface of the waters where the
spirit of God lies sleeping. It should deal carelessly with poor things
like prepositions and pronouns. They are but the spray-bubbles beaten
back by its wings. Your smaller words are staffs falling as regularly
and heavily as a tread on a board walk. Your phrases march; they do not
fly. You will say that these lines were written under a pressure of
strong emotion; but that's no reason. So might a prosy divine put forth
his religion as an excuse for prosing. Have your emotion, but keep it
to yourself if you can express it no better than this. It is neither
"_magnifique_," nor is it--literature. Nor does your prose entirely
please me. Look how it is tinged with its own sweetness. Everything is
superlative. You are not content to say a thing in one way; you must
say it in three, and then overload it with metaphor till the
understanding balks at it. You write like this:--

"The night burned clear, illumined by a million stars. Memory was with
me, and love; they, the divine. I was restless; I could not sleep. I
came out of my chamber, impatient, praying for dawn."

Your images hunt in couples, and it won't do, save in the Psalms.
Simplicity, simplicity! that must be our aim. That makes a sentence
read as if it had stood immemorially, as if it formed an integral part
of the Creator's speech when He overlooked His work and found it good.
(You see I fall into your trick of repeated images. Indeed, it is one
of the queer coincidences of fate that our phrasing should be much
alike.) This same simplicity it is which shall make Ruskin a monument
of white, like an angel with carven wings, when Sartor Resartus lies
howling, with none so poor to patch him. Ah! and by the way--very much
by the way--don't be feverish again. Don't take my idle words of last
time for more than they are worth. I told you they meant nothing. When
will you believe?

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_]

Their nothing is my all. You have declared it. The words lie in my
hand. Discourse to a man upon rhetoric, when your own letter says, "You
are dear to me"! We will talk this out. We will, I say. If not alone,
before them all. Come into the woods with me to-night at nine, and with
only the dark for witness you shall swear to me love--or denial.

[Sidenote: _Zoe Montrose to Francis Hume_]

Was it a week ago we spoke together there by the r