The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack “the accomplishment of verse.”  The sudden electric injection of light into a thought or object or sentiment—­in this consists the gift poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and transmit it.  A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly rise to a style.  Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is utterly devoid of the faculty of style (denue de la faculte du style).  Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great Moliere.  Thence, Joubert says, “Many of our poets having written in prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and audacities which it would not have had without them.  Perhaps, too, some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers, have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities, with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the exclusive property of the poetic idiom.”

A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in presence of the defective or the incomplete.  This endowment implies a mind not only susceptible of the higher and finer movements of thought, but which eagerly demands them, and which thus makes the writer exacting towards himself.  Hence only he attains to a genuine correctness; he was correct by instinct before he was so by discipline.  In the whole as well as the parts he requires finish and proportion.  Within him there is a momentum which fills out his thought and its worded envelope to warm convexity.  Only he has the fine tact and discernment to know the full meaning of each word he uses.  The best style is organic in its details as well as its structure; it shows modeling, a handling of words and phrases with the pliancy and plastic effects of clay in the hands of the sculptor.  Goethe says that only poets and artists have method, because they require to see a thing before them in a completed, rounded form.  Writing is a fine art, and one of the finest; and he who would be a master in this art must unite genial gifts with conscientious culture.

Of style the highest examples, therefore, are to be found in the verse of the great poets, of the deep rhythmic souls who make a sure, agile intellect their willing Ariel; and no prose writer gets to be a master in style but through kindred endowment.  The compact, symmetrical combination of gifts and acquirements, of genius with talent, demanded for the putting forth of a fresh, priceless poem, this he need not have; but his perceptions must be brightened by the light whose fountain is the inward enjoyment of the more perfect in form, deed, and sentiment, and his best thoughts suffused with that fragrance whose only source is the ravishment of the beautiful.