tley, for instance; there is a new quality in the page,--it has
become alive. _Freshness_ is perhaps the best word to describe this
additional element; it is a style that has blood in it. This may come
from various sources,--good health, animal spirits, outdoor habits, or
simply an ardent nature. It is hard to describe this quality, or to give
rules for it; the most obvious way to acquire it is to keep one's life
fresh and vigorous, to write only what presses to be said, and to utter
that as if the world waited for the saying. Where lies the extraordinary
power of "Jane Eyre," for instance? In the intense earnestness which
vitalizes every line; each atom of the author's life appears to come
throbbing and surging through it; every sentence seems endowed with a
soul of its own, and looks up at you with human eyes.

The next element of literary art may be said to be _structure_. So
strong in the American mind is the demand for system and completeness,
that the logical element of style, which is its skeleton, is not rare
among us. But this is only the basis; besides the philosophical
structure of a statement which comes by thought, there is an artistic
structure which implies the education of the taste. So, in the human
body, there is a symmetry of the bony frame, and there is a further
symmetry of the rounded flesh which should cover it; and in literature
it is not enough to have a perfectly framed logical skeleton,--there
should be also a well-proportioned beauty of utterance, which is the
flesh. Unless this inward and outward structure exist, although a book
may be never so valuable, it hardly comes within the domain of literary
art.

These different types of structure may perhaps be illustrated by three
different books, all belonging to the intermediate ground between
science and art. I should say that Buckle's "History of Civilization,"
with all its wealth and vigor, is exceedingly loose-jointed in all its
logical structure, and also very defective in its literary structure,
although it happens to have an element of freshness which is rare in
such a work, and carries the reader along. Darwin's "Origin of Species"
is better; that has at the bottom a strong logic, whether conclusive or
otherwise, but is so rambling and confused in its merely literary
statement, that it does itself no justice. A third book, Huxley's
"Lectures," combines with its logic a power of clear and symmetrical
statement that gives it a rare charm,