exture and expansibility to become surcharged
with magnetic effluence, has moreover that aesthetic gift of rhythmic
expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the
high and exquisite possibilities of created things,--when such a mind,
under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse
its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry is
thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in
musical cadence._ And when we consider that thought is the gathering
of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative
sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its
tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is
heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some
sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine
poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind,
and involves in its production a beatific visionariness.

III.

STYLE.

Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best things
have been done, the best things have been said. The history of Attica
is richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of old
Greece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England in
modern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form of
those will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets its
texture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is the
most profitable to the student of English on account of style, I
should answer, study Shakespeare.

Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were a
good recipe for style. In this brief precept there are more
ingredients than at first view appear. To have something to say
implies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out of
his memory; and so to write involves much more than many people
are aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is a
primary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh.
Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies faculty
of choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbal
superfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some of
the finer aesthetic forces.

Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts),
not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one
with inharmonious or defective