produce very varied effects; and we have seen how judicious application of the principles of composition to sentences of any kind - long or short, periodic or loose, balanced or unbalanced- may help us to vary and to define the effects we have in mind. It is our business now to inquire concerning sentences, just as we inquired concerning words, in what these effects. consist.

There is no need of repeating in detail what I said then. I pointed out, you will remember, the inevitable discrepancy between the limited number of words in our possession and the virtually infinite number of thoughts in the mind of every living man; and I showed how in fact every word we use or hear not only names an idea, but suggests along with it a considerable number of others: the idea it names it denotes; the ideas it suggests it connotes.

What we then found true of words by themselves must obviously be true, in a vastly greater and more. complicated degree, of words in composition. Composition combines every phase of the words it brings together; in the organism of the sentence denotation. and connotation fuse. Take the simplest of examples,

two words: I speak. As I utter these words in combination, the pronoun calls up certain individualities of face and form and manner and dress, and what not. If any one else should utter the same words, the whole connotation would alter. The changed denotation of the pronoun, of course, would be the chief feature of the alteration; but this change

would be more than enough completely to alter the connotation of the verb. Or take a somewhat longer example, but just as simple, where there is no change in denotation at all. Some years ago a gentleman died hereabouts, whose literary style was much admired by the friend who wrote an obituary notice of him: "His English," ran the sentence, which I have remembered for years, " was purified by constant study of the best models: the English Bible, Shakspere, Addison, and Fisher Ames." I confess that this sentence, which has often made me laugh, is what has chiefly kept alive in my mind the memory of our deceased fellow-citizen. But if his admirer had turned the phrase the other way, without altering his denotation a bit, he would have secured a connotation if not more favorable to the immortality of his subject, at least more consonant with its dignity: "His English was purified by constant study of the best models: Fisher Ames, Addison, Shakspere, and the English Bible." Of compositions, then, we may say just what we said of words: in the first place, they so name ideas that we may identify them; in the second place, they inevitably suggest at the same time a very subtile and complicated set of associated ideas and emotions. In short, compositions, like words, inevitably possess both denotation and connotation; and whoever would intelligently compose sentences must know, in deciding what effect he would produce, both what he would denote and what he would connote.

IV.

PARAGRAPHS.

IN discussing both words and sentences, I have reminded you more than once that both of these elements of style are inevitable in all discourse, written or spoken. To exist at all, a language must have not only words, but settled forms in which those words compose intelligible sentences. The good use which ultimately governs both words and sentences is a fact which has arisen from the generally spontaneous consent, first of talkers, and then of writers. In its broader form it is a fact to which in every word he speaks, in every thought he articulately formulates, every man of us must constantly conform. In writing words and sentences, then, we simply put on paper things that we are incessantly making. We record our habits of thought. Now, there is no fact in human experience much more settled than this: to do anything thoroughly well we must not stop in the act to consider how we are doing it. Action of any kind may be carefully planned; things once done may be rigorously scrutinized and criticised. But the time to plan is before work begins; the time to criticise is after work is done. To pause in the course of work, won

dering whether we are on the right course, is almost certainly to blunder. This is nowhere truer than in composition. The task of the writer, as I can hardly repeat too often, is a very wonderful one. It is nothing less than an act of creative imagination, than the giving of a visible material body to an eternally immaterial reality, which until embodied must remain unknown to all but the one human being who knows it. In the act of creation there is but one possible course it is to concentrate attention as closely as we possibly can on the reality which we would make real to others than ourselves. Only thus, I believe, can the words we create possess even a shadow of the vitality which makes the thought they symbolize a thing so inexpressibly real.

And yet, if the work of the writer ended here, there were no use in all this pother about the elements of style. It is true, I believe, that our best work of any kind is done in those moments of splendid adjustment when the forces without ourselves for a little while relax their crushing hostility; but such moments of inspiration are not common. The most we can generally do is to mimic them as best we may, seeking in ourselves the motive force that is denied us from without; and even though our mimicry sometimes come so near the truth that for the while we forget ourselves, we can never be sure that the work we have done is the work that we meant to do. We must plan it, then, as carefully as we can; and once done, we must scrutinize it with all our care.

In this planning and this scrutiny we need principles to guide us; these principles are what I am trying to set and to keep before you.

To put these high-sounding generalities in concrete terms, the experience of pretty much every writer is something like this: An idea presents itself to him in a general form; he is impressed with some fact in experience, perhaps, which nothing but the most exquisite verse can adequately formulate; or perhaps he receives an invitation to dinner which he wants to accept. His first task and often his longest- is to plan his work: he decides how to begin, what course to follow, where to end. His next task is to fill out his plan; in other words, to compose, in accordance with the general outline in his mind, a series of words and sentences which shall so symbolize this outline that other minds than his can perceive it. His final task is to revise the work he has executed, and to see whether he has succeeded in producing the effects-denotative and connotative - which he had in view.

It is in this revision that the principles we have hitherto discussed become valuable. In actual writing, just as in actual thinking and talking, no sane man stops to consider words or syntax. But in revision of writing few men are fortunate enough to find themselves so completely made in the divine image as unhesitatingly to pronounce their work good. If it is not good, it fails of excellence because in one way or another the writer has neglected the principles of