Words are things:  it is useless to try to set them in a world apart.  They exist in books only by accident, and for one written there are a thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken.  They are deeds:  the man who brings word of a lost battle can work no comparable effect with the muscles of his arm; Iago’s breath is as truly laden with poison and murder as the fangs of the cobra and the drugs of the assassin.  Hence the sternest education in the use of words is least of all to be gained in the schools, which cultivate verbiage in a highly artificial state of seclusion.  A soldier cares little for poetry, because it is the exercise of power that he loves, and he is accustomed to do more with his words than give pleasure.  To keep language in immediate touch with reality, to lade it with action and passion, to utter it hot from the heart of determination, is to exhibit it in the plenitude of power.  All this may be achieved without the smallest study of literary models, and is consistent with a perfect neglect of literary canons.  It is not the logical content of the word, but the whole mesh of its conditions, including the character, circumstances, and attitude of the speaker, that is its true strength.  “Damn” is often the feeblest of expletives, and “as you please” may be the dirge of an empire.  Hence it is useless to look to the grammarian, or the critic, for a lesson in strength of style; the laws that he has framed, good enough in themselves, are current only in his own abstract world.  A breath of hesitancy will sometimes make trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in writing, a thing three times said, and each time said badly, may be of more effect than that terse, full, and final expression which the doctors rightly commend.  The art of language, regarded as a question of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone you can do next to nothing.  The realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence:  whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the sea.  Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence are a part of their material; the story-teller or the playwright can make of words a background and definition for deeds, a framework for those silences that are more telling than any speech.  Here lies an escape from the poverty of content and method to which self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; and therefore are epic and drama rated above all other kinds of poetry.  The greater force of the objective treatment is witnessed by many essayists and lyrical poets, whose ambition has led them, sooner or later, to attempt the novel or the play.  There are weaknesses inherent in all direct self-revelation; the thing, perhaps, is