a melody not too often
resonant, which captivates the reader's attention, and is always
producing a mood in him conducive to a favorable reception of what the
writer is anxious to convey. Next to such melody I should put a logical
adaptation of stress, or of emphasis in the construction of sentences,
which corresponds in detail to the movements of the reader's mind--a
halt in the words occurring where the mind halts, a new rapidity in the
words when the mind, satisfied thus far, is prepared to resume its
progress. To these qualities, as essential to perfection in prose, I
might easily add others; but these are so complex and comprehensive that
they practically imply the rest.

With regard, then, to these essentials, the practice which I have had to
adopt in my own efforts to produce them has been more or less as
follows. The general substance of what I proposed to say I have written
out first in the loosest language possible, without any regard to
melody, to accuracy, or even to correct grammar. I have then rewritten
this matter, with a view, not to any verbal improvement, but merely to
the rearrangement of ideas, descriptions, or arguments, so that this may
accord with the sequence of questions, expectations, or emotions which
are likely, by a natural logic, to arise in the reader's mind--nothing
being said too soon, nothing being said too late, and nothing (except
for the sake of deliberate emphasis) being said twice over. The
different paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had
been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze,
but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor
or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of
connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one,
till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The
task of thus carving each and fitting it to its next-door neighbors has
always been, merely for its own sake, exceedingly fascinating to myself,
but it has generally been long and slow. Most of my own books, when
their general substance had been roughly got into order by means of
several tentative versions, were, paragraph by paragraph, written again
five or six times more, the corrections each time growing more and more
minute, and finally the clauses and wording of each individual sentence
were transposed, or rebalanced or reworded, whenever such processes
should be necessary,