he skill, or the party and personal
feelings of the particular writer. Science, then, has to do with things,
literature with thoughts; science is universal, literature is personal;
science uses words merely as symbols, but literature uses language in its
full compass, as including phraseology, idiom, style, composition, rhythm,
eloquence, and whatever other properties are included in it.

Let us then put aside the scientific use of words, when we are to speak of
language and literature. Literature is the personal use or exercise of
language. That this is so is further proved from the fact that one author
uses it so differently from another. Language itself in its very
origination would seem to be traceable to individuals. Their peculiarities
have given it its character. We are often able in fact to trace particular
phrases or idioms to individuals; we know the history of their rise. Slang
surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal. The
connection between the force of words in particular languages and the
habits and sentiments of the nations speaking them has often been pointed
out. And, while the many use language as they find it, the man of genius
uses it indeed, but subjects it withal to his own purposes, and moulds it
according to his own peculiarities. The throng and succession of ideas,
thoughts, feelings, imaginations, aspirations, which pass within him, the
abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations,
the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external
things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises of
his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these
innumerable and incessant creations, the very pulsation and throbbing of
his intellect, does he image forth, to all does he give utterance, in a
corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward mental action
itself and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense
personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very
shadow: so that we might as well say that one man's shadow is another's as
that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself. It
follows him about _as_ a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and
so his language is personal.

4.

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression
are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language. This is what I
have been