to close dependence, to continuous enchainment.  He detested a chopped, jerky style, that into which the French are prone to fall.  Certain it is, and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place promptly, because naturally and necessarily.  Through fusion and close coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively.  The grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends much, nay primarily, on the joints.  So with the body of a good writer’s thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance.  To the linking of sentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inward sap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style.  The springiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of its nervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of the thoughts.  By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring of feeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful.  Words, sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically, attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled from brisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh and true.  Soul is the source of style.  Not sensibility alone is a prerequisite for style:  the sensibility must be active, made active by the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best.  A good style will have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not the gloss of outward rubbing.

That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treated ought to be self-evident.  In every page of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in “King Lear.”  In his “Recollections of Charles Lamb” De Quincey writes, “Far be it from me to say one word in praise of those—­people of how narrow a sensibility—­who imagine that a simple (that is, according to many tastes, an unelevated and unrhythmical) style—­take, for instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style—­is unconditionally good.  Not so:  all depends upon the subject; and there is a style, transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinite degrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, the rhythmical, the continuous—­what in French is called the soutenu—­which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ to a shepherd’s pipe.  This also finds its justification in its subject; and the subject which can justify it must be of a corresponding quality—­loftier—­and therefore, rare.”