3 Review(s)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: changeable as the spirit, and not to be calculated on. Sometimes, very likely most often, our mirthful disposition will predominate, and we shall be as playful, even on a great topic, as a kitten on a new carpet. Then we may be more grave, as gravity shall be absolutely needed, or it shall suit our frame of mind. Now and then it is possible that we shall be quite rhetorical, mounting up, and curling this way and that, like fog in the morning. We cannot promise auroral tinges on our vapor. Then again, we shall become as flat and as tame as sand at the river side. We shall venture now and then to roll into a sentence a strangely compounded word, which would make one, or, at least, now does make one, think of a block of pudding-stone cumbering the ground. Then, right along after, we have three or four little loose words, all out of proportion, that will be like sharp-cornered gravel- stones to tender foot of thin-slippered critic. We may be thought by some nice people to sink occasionally as low as mud, by what they would call an expression of vulgar mould. But in defence, if such be needed, we would suggest, that popular phraseologies have an easiness of in-fit, and an adhesiveness for staying fit and fast to the common reader's capacity. Or, rather, peculiar expressions, caught from the living and everyday tongue, are like good strong cement, by which the literary fabric is sc.iily compacted, and built into the understanding and memory to remain forever. Finally, as we find our own materials, we must be permitted to manage them in our own way. As we can be nobody else, we shall try to be ourself. LETTEE III. THE WHY AND WHEREFORE OF OUR WRITING. The title-page goes like a superscribed wrapper on our epistles, directed to you, and indicating what is underneath. You perce...