onal temperament yields
admirable results. Take the following splendid passage from "Modern
Painters," descriptive of a sunrise in the Alps: "Wait for one hour,
until the east again becomes purple, and the heaving mountains, rolling
against the darkness, like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by one
in the glory of its burning; watch the white glaciers blaze in their
winding paths about the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of
fire; watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling downwards,
chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning; their long avalanches cast
down in keen streams brighter than the lightning, sending each its
tribute of driven snow, like altar-smoke, up to the heaven; the
rose-light of their silent domes flushing that heaven about them and
above them, piercing with purer light through its purple lines of lifted
cloud, casting a new glory on every wreath as it passes by, until the
whole heaven--one scarlet canopy--is interwoven with a roof of waving
flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the drifted wings of
many companies of angels; and then, when you can look no more for
gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love of the Maker
and Doer of this, tell me who has best delivered this His message unto
men!"

(4) Once more, force of will, firmness of conviction, energy of
character are conducive to strength. Where these exist there will be
directness of aim, and the style will be clear, unwavering, and strong.
There will be positiveness of statement, and sometimes intolerant
dogmatism. Carlyle and Macaulay are among our strongest writers, the
former being rugged, and the latter more polished in his strength.
Macaulay's broad-shouldered, stout-limbed constitution is reflected in
such passages as the following from his essay on Lord Bacon: "The moral
qualities of Bacon were not of a high order. We do not say that he was a
bad man. He was not inhuman or tyrannical. He bore with meekness his
high civil honors, and the far higher honors gained by his intellect. He
was very seldom, if ever, provoked into treating any person with
malignity and insolence. No man more readily held up the left cheek to
those who had smitten the right. No man was more expert at the soft
answer which turneth away wrath. His faults were--we write it with
pain--coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. He seems to have been
incapable of feeling strong affection, of facing great dangers, of
making