A good style is a stream, and a lively stream:  it flows ever onward actively.  The worst vice a style can have is languor.  With some writers a full stop is a double full stop:  the reader does not get forward.  Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies.  In many minds there is not leap enough for a style.  Excellence in style demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable sequence.

Writers there are who get to be partially self-enslaved by a routine of phrases and words under the repetition of which thought is hardened by its molds.  Thence mechanical turns and forms, which cause numbness, even when there is a current of intellectual activity.  Writers most liable to this subjection are they who have surrendered themselves to set opinions and systems, who therefore cease to grow,—­a sad condition for man or writer.

Hypocrites in writing, as in talking and doing, end badly.  A writer who through his style aims to seem better or other than himself is soon found out.  The desire so to seem argues a literary incapacity; it looks as though the very self—­which will shine through the style—­lacked confidence in its own substance.  And after all, in writing as in doing and talking, a man must be himself, will be himself in spite of himself.  One cannot put on his neighbor’s style any more than he can put on his neighbor’s limbs.

Not only has prose its melody as well as verse, but there is no style unless sentences are pervaded, I might say animated, by rhythm; lacking appropriate movement, they are inelastic, inert, drowsy.  Rhythm implies a soul behind it and in it.  The best style will have a certain rotundity imparted by the ceaseless rocking of thought in the deep ocean of sentiment.  Without some music in them sentences were torpid, impracticable.  To put thoughts and words so together that there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind.  Hence Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse.  The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener in life’s healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound.  Nature is alive with music.  In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life.  On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes in great part from the absence of sound.  But stand in spring under a broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from unseen choristers.  Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing, unseen, and ever rhythmical.