See Brewster on Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive (Studies in Structure and Style, pages 272-275), and compare the three short paragraphs opening The Stones of Venice. Thoreau, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (“ Sunday,” pages 110-111 of the Boston edition, 1868), makes some vaguely metaphorical but very suggestive notes on Elizabethan sentence harmony. The following passages are worth studying for the finer harmonies:

(c)

(1) The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the

ul
waters |

6

(2) is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men

uulu

had come to desire.

(3) Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world

(5) It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, Uuul

(

7

3 (24)

5

(6) the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and

fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.

12

10 (15)

(7) Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek god

desses or beautiful women of antiquity, |

(8) and how they would be troubled by this beauty,

ΙΟ

3

ul (9) into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!

4 (27)

(10) All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched

(11) in that which they have of power to refine and make

(12) the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, |

(13) the revery of the middle age with its spiritual ambition

and imaginative loves, |

(14) the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. uuluu

7

~ 5 (31)

(15) She is older than the rocks among which she sits; |

(16) like the vampire, she has been dead many times, |

(17) and learned the secrets of the grave; |

(18) and has been a diver in deep seas, |

(19) and keeps their fallen day about her; |

5

5

3

3

4

(20) and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; |

(21) and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, |

(22) and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; |

3

5

(23) and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and

flutes, |

6

(24) and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded

(25) and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

(26) The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten

(27) and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity

as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes

of thought and life.

13 (22) (28) Certainly, Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of

I drank; and suddenly sprang forth before me many groves and palaces and gardens, and their statues and their avenues and their labyrinths of alaternus and bay, and alcoves of citron and watchful loopholes in the retirements of impenetrable pomegranate. Farther off, just below where the fountain slipt away from its marble hall and guardian gods, arose, from their beds of moss and drosera and darkest grass, the sisterhood of oleanders, fond of tantalizing with their bosomed flowers and their moist and pouting blossoms the little shy rivulet, and of covering its face with all the colours of the dawn. My dream expanded and moved forward. I trod again the dust of Posilippo, soft as the feathers in the wings of Sleep. I emerged on Baia; I crossed her innumerable arches; I loitered in the breezy sunshine of her mole; I trusted the faithful seclusion of her caverns, the keepers of so many secrets; and I reposed on the buoyancy of her tepid sea. Then Naples, and her theatres

and her churches, and grottoes and dells and forts and promontories, rushed forward in confusion, now among soft whispers, now among sweetest sounds, and subsided, and sank, and disappeared. Yet a memory seemed to come fresh from every one; each had time enough for its tale, for its pleasure, for its reflection, for its pang. As I mounted with silent steps the narrow staircase of the old palace, how distinctly did I feel against the palm of my hand the coldness of that smooth stonework, and the greater of the cramps of iron in it !

-LANDOR, Pentameron, Fifth Day.

(e)

Certainly at some hour, though perhaps not your hour, the waiting waters will stir; in some shape, though perhaps not the shape you dreamed, which your heart loved, and for which it bled, the healing herald will descend; the crippled and the blind and the dumb and the possessed will be led to bathe. Herald, come quickly.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Villette, Chapter xvii.

237. Albalat observes that La Fontaine, the pattern of simplicity, revised untiringly: "Il refaisait jusqu'à douze fois la même fable. Ses manuscrits sont noirs de ratures"1(La Formation du Style par l'Assimilation des Auteurs, page 301).

1"He would make over the same fable as many as a dozen times. His manuscripts are black with corrections."