iginal structure in thought not organically complete. With such
foresight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written out
of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With
some strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold of
which secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the
literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to
joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracing
the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he
may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting
mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least not
interrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the end comes, is
burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it,
leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end,
but in all the freshness of volition. His work now structurally
complete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades of
meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that
ante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive. The house he
has built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to its
greater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be
recounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading.
And though there are instances of great writers who have been no
artists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we may
detect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet one
of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the
critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and the
pervading sense of it [25] as we read. Yet of poetic literature too;
for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is
one of the forms of the imagination.

That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul:--hard
to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough
practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with
each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of
preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of
preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a
fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of
attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety
which makes the actual result seem like som