the severity of intellectual discipline, harmonizes each musical syllable into a prose of leisurely sweetness and sonorous strength. "Court not felicity too far, and weary not the favorable hand of fortune." "Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." "The race of delight is short, and pleasures have mutable faces." Such sentences, woven with curious skill from the rich fabric of seventeenth-century English, defy the wreckage of time. In them a gentle dignity of thought finds its appropriate expression, and the restfulness of an unvexed mind breathes its quiet beauty into each cadenced line. Here are no "boisterous metaphors," such as Dryden scorned, to give undue emphasis at every turn, and amaze the careless reader with the cheap delights of turbulence. Here is no trace of that "full habit of speech," hateful to Mr. Arnold's soul, and which, in the years to come, was to be the gift of journalism to literature.
The felicitous choice of words, which with most writers is the result of severe study and unswerving vigilance, seems with a favored few—who should be envied and not imitated
