y pronounced
than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of
beauty start at once into existence, and all the
burial-places of memory give up their dead. Change the
structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for
another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses
its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it
would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian
tale, when he stood crying, 'Open Wheat,' 'Open Barley,' to
the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open Sesame.' In the
miserable failure of Dryden in his attempt to translate into
his own diction some parts of the 'Paradise Lost' is a
remarkable instance of this." ("Essay on Milton," by
Macaulay.)

Length of opening and closing Sentences.

By examination, one finds that the first sentence of a paragraph of
exposition and of argument is usually a terse statement of the
proposition; and that after the proposition has been established there
follows a longer sentence gathering up all the points of the
discussion into a full, rounded period which forms a suitable climax
and conclusion of the paragraph. Of Macaulay's "Milton" one is quite
inside the truth when he says that of those paragraphs containing an
opening topic-sentence and its restatement as a conclusion, the
closing sentence is the longer in the ratio of two to one. In Burke's
"Conciliation," the ratio rises as high as four to one. There are,
however, exceptions to the rule. Paragraphs sometimes close with a
shorter statement of the proposition, a sort of aphorism or epigram.
As this kind of sentence is fascinating, some books have said that
paragraphs should close so; that it is like cracking a whip, and gives
a snap to the paragraph not gained in any other way. Even if readers
enjoyed having paragraphs close in this cracking manner, it must be
borne in mind that not all conclusions are capable of such a
statement, and, what is worse, that the tendency to seek for epigrams
leads to untruth and a degenerated form of witticism. Such forced
sentences are only half truths, or they are a bit of cheap repartee.
Such a close is effective, if the whole truth can be so expressed; but
to seek for such sentences is dangerous. The best rule is the one
already stated; it applies to the long sentence and the short sentence
alike. It is that a paragraph should close with words that deserve
distinction.

P