eauty of
the expected beat in verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more
lawless melody, patent as they are to English hearing, are already
silent in the ears of our next neighbours; for in France the oratorical
accent and the pattern of the web have almost or altogether succeeded to
their places; and the French prose writer would be astounded at the
labours of his brother across the Channel, and how a good quarter of his
toil, above all _invita Minerva_, is to avoid writing verse. So
wonderfully far apart have races wandered in spirit, and so hard it is
to understand the literature next door!

Yet French prose is distinctly better than English; and French verse,
above all while Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one side. What
is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French is easily
distinguishable as comely or uncomely. There is then another element of
comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of the
phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in
music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and
harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances
is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to
all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so
far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable
nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will
not see? The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence,
depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel
demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both
cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a
letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it,
perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at
you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one
liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will find another
and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two
senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive "unheard melodies";
and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase.
Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there
are assonances and alliterations; that where an author is running the
open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English spelling, he will
often show a tenderness for the