nge) our feelings have a more abiding associatlon,--under these
circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten
selves are most apt to startle and waylay us."

The beauty of this passage seems to me marred by the awkward yet
necessary interruption, "under these circumstances it is," which would
have been avoided by opening the sentence with "such evanescent
hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle us in
solitudes," &c. Compare the effect of directness in the following:--

"This was one of the most common shapes of extinguished power from
which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay
came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and
vanishing glimpses recovered for one moment from the Paradise of youth,
and from fields of joy and power, over which for him too certainly he
felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever."

Obedience to the law of Sequence gives strength by giving clearness and
beauty of rhythm; it economises force and creates music. A very
trifling disregard of it will mar an effect. See an example both of
obedience and trifling disobedience in the following passage from
Ruskin:--

"People speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts,
as if houses and lands and food and raiment were alone useful, and as
if Sight, Thought, and Admiration were all profitless, so that men
insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had
their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as
far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than life and
the raiment than the body, who look on earth as a stable and to its
fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen who love the corn they
grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels
upon the slopes of Eden."

It is instinctive to contrast the dislocated sentence, "who would turn,
if they had their way, themselves and their race," with the sentence
which succeeds it, "men who think, as far as such men can be said to
think, that the meat," &c. In the latter the parenthetic interruption
is a source of power: it dams the current to increase its force; in the
former the inversion is a loss of power: it is a dissonance to the ear
and a diversion of the thought.

As illustrations of Sequence in composition, two passages may be quoted
from Macaulay which display the power of pictorial suggestions when,
instead of