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world, I would wish to contribute my own brief word of homage to this grandeur by recalling from a fading remembrance of twenty-five years back a short bravura of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. I call it a bravura, as being intentionally a passage of display and elaborate execution; and in this sense I may call it partly 'my own,' that at twenty-five years' distance, after one single reading, it would not have been possible for any man to report a passage of this length without greatly disturbing the texture of the composition. By altering, one makes it partly one's own; but it is right to mention that the sublime turn at the end belongs entirely to Jean Paul.

"God called up from dreams a man into the vestibule of heaven, saying, Come thou hither and see the glory of my house. And to the servants that stood around his throne he said, Take him and undress him from his robes of flesh; cleanse his vision, and put a new breath into his nostrils; only touch not with any change his human heart-the heart that weeps and trembles. It was done; and with a mighty angel for his guide, the man stood ready for his infinite voyage; and from the terraces of heaven, without sound or farewell, at once they wheeled away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel wing they fled through Zaarahs of darkness, through wildernesses of death that divided the worlds of life; sometimes they swept over frontiers that were quickening under prophetic motions from God. Then from a distance that is counted only in heaven light dawned for a time through a sleepy film; by unutterable pace the light swept to them, they by unutterable pace to the light; in a moment the rushing of planets was upon them; in a moment the blazing of suns was around them. Then came eternities of twilight that revealed but were not revealed. To the right hand and to the left towered mighty constellations, that by self-repetitions and answers from afar, that by counterpositions, built up triumphal gates, whose architraves, whose archways-horizontal, upright— rested, rose at altitudes, by spans that seemed ghostly from infinitude. Without measure were the architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates. Within were stars that scaled the eternities above, that descended to the eternities below; above was below, below was above, to the man stripped of gravitating body; depth was swallowed up in height unsurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly, as thus they rode from infinite to infinite; suddenly, as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose that systems more mysterious, that worlds more billowy-other heights and other depths—were coming, were nearer, were at hand. Then the man sighed and stopped, shuddered and wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in tears; and he said, Angel, I will go no farther, for the spirit of man aches with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me lie down in the grave from the persecutions of the Infinite, for end, I see, there is none. And from all the listening stars that shone around issued a choral voice, The man speaks truly; end there is none that ever yet we heard of. End is there none? the angel solemnly demanded. Is there indeed no end, and is this the sorrow that kills you? But no voice answered that he might answer himself. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, sayingEnd is there none to the universe of God! So, also, there is no beginning!'"

The term "bravura" may also be applied with equal appropriateness to the following passage from De Quincey:

"The dream commenced with a music which now I often hear in dreams, a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the coronation anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. . . . Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Then came sudden alarms, hurryings to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives, darkness and lights, tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed-and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells; and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated-everlasting farewells, and again and yet again reverberated-everlasting farewells!”

CHAPTER VII.

QUALITIES OF STYLE ASSOCIATED WITH HARMONY.

$ 300. QUALITIES OF STYLE CONDUCIVE TO HARMONY. A TRUE Conception of rhetorical harmony shows that it is associated with various qualities of style and forms of expression which deserve special notice.

1. Many of those which have already been considered under the heads of perspicuity and persuasiveness are of great importance here. Thus purity is essential; for no one can pretend to be an elegant writer who is guilty of barbarisms or solecisms. Precision also is necessary; for the elegant writer should select the word that is best able to convey the most delicate shade of meaning.

$301. FIGURES OF SPEECH.

2. Figures of speech also have a close connection with harmony. It has already been shown that however they may be classified, they nearly all tend to embellishment. They have not only their own peculiar power, whether of enhancing the importance of a subject, or of illustrating it, or of giving it

greater emphasis; but they also almost always confer upon it a certain charm which can be gained in no other way. The plain statement of a thing is usually commonplace, and, while sufficiently clear and intelligible, is nothing more; but when the statement is made by means of figurative language, it may be full of grace and elegance.

While nearly all the figures of speech have this effect, it is chiefly manifested by the figures of relativity-comparison, allusion, and the tropes. Here the law of association comes into play; and the presentation to the mind of some new and striking image, connected with the subject by the relation of similarity or contrast, seldom fails to excite the sense of the beautiful.

This subject has already been so fully treated of that nothing further need now be said; but for illustrations of the beauty of figures, reference may be made to the numerous examples already given.

302. EASE OF STYLE.

3. The name is its own definition, and it can only be acquired by attention to those things in which elegance consists. Some have by nature such fine perceptions that they seem to write almost without effort in an easy and agreeable manner. This is principally evident in letter-writing. De Quincey attributes to cultivated women a peculiar talent, and says:

"We are satisfied, from the many beautiful female letters which we have heard upon chance occasions from every quarter of the empire, that they— the educated women of Great Britain—are the true and best depositaries of the old mother idiom.... Cicero and Quintilian, each for his own generation, ascribed something of the same pre-eminence to the noble matrons of Rome; and more than one writer of the Lower Empire has recorded of Byzantium that in the nurseries of that city was found the last home for the purity of the ancient Greek."

Ease of style is very different from easy writing. By the latter term is meant nothing more than a careless and tedious fluency, and this has led to the saying that easy writing is hard reading. But ease of style includes gracefulness and precision, careful finish, and various other qualities which are worth enumerating.

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Ist. Smoothness. By this is meant simple euphony, without rising above the general level of harmonious expression, or falling below it. As a general thing it is associated with the diffuse style. Among the poets it is illustrated by Beattie, Shenstone, Cowper, Akenside, Rogers, and others. In prose the chief examples are to be found in such sermons as those of Blair and Boyd, the histories of Prescott, and the essays and discourses of Edward Everett.

2d. Finish is the exhibition of great care in the choice and arrangement of words, and the embellishment of style.

3d. Delicacy involves unusual discrimination in the application of words. It is the union of precision with elegance. The poetry of Pope exhibits this quality, as well as the preceding one, in a remarkable degree.

4th. Grace refers to taste and discernment of the beautiful in thought and expression, with finish and delicacy. This is pre-eminent in the poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson.

5th. A correct style is composition in which attention is paid to all the rules derived from authoritative usage, and where the imagination and the emotions are in some measure repressed. It indicates rather a freedom from fault than the possession of positive attractiveness. In poetry it used to be applied to writings after the model of Pope and Dryden, as distinguished from the irregular construction of such poems as Coleridge's Christabel. The style of Addison, Goldsmith, and Irving is correct; while the term would not be applied to that of Carlyle. Macaulay inveighs against critics who stand up for correctness, in a passage which is quoted elsewhere.

6th. Chaste. This term is applicable to style which is correct and accompanied by the display of imaginative power, yet nowhere out of control of a cultivated taste, or rising to anything like fervor. Thus Addison is chaste in style; he satisfies the taste; but he never rises to those exaltations of thought, feeling, and expression which are so manifest in the writings of Burke.

These qualities all contribute towards ease of style, yet they may exist individually in a conspicuous way, and sometimes without necessarily leading to it. In general, it may be said that much care, together with much practice, is needed before true ease of style can be attained. This is Pope's opinion:

"For ease in writing comes by art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance."

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It is also expressed in the well-known saying: Ars celare artem.'

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$303. ORNAMENT.

4. Ornament enters, to a certain extent, into the composition of elegance. The term "ornate" is applied to style which is characterized by unusual embellishment. It is closely allied to the florid, and is liable to pass into it. Burke's writings afford frequent examples of ornament carried as far as possible. Thus in his panegyric on Sheridan the epithets are heaped together in profusion, synonymous words are accumulated, and there is a general air of exaggeration. His celebrated description of Marie Antoinette, though highly ornate and sometimes extravagant, is yet so full of tenderness and deep emotion that the reader has no other feeling than admiration and sympathy. The language of eulogy is always apt to run to extravagance and over-ornament, and the kind of composition called "panegyric" is notoriously, from its very nature, excessively embellished and florid.

Richness of style means something ornate, yet far more. It involves copiousness of thought, excitement of imagination, and often high emotion. The style of Ruskin is rich, as may be seen in the following example :

"Not long ago I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage-road, the first turn after you leave Albano. . . . It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban mount the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber."

Elaboration. This term is applied to writings where the style is carefully corrected, polished, and enriched with rhetorical embellishment. Amplification and climax often present examples of this.

A gorgeous style is the exhibition of great pomp and splendor, as in passages of Milton's prose works and the writings of Jeremy Taylor.

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