There is need ... of oversight and guidance ... for a choice of words at once pure and noble ... and a sentence movement combining charm with dignity.... The chief heads under which I propose to treat the subject are the following: what is the nature of sentence movement and what force it has; what are its aims and how it attains them; what are its generic varieties, and what is the distinctive feature of each, and which of them I believe to be best; and still further, what is that poetical something, both pleasant on the tongue and sweet to the ear, which naturally accompanies the sentence movement of prose, and wherein lies the force of that poetical method which imitates unpoetical speech and succeeds thoroughly in the imitation, and by what method each of these two may be attained.[4] Sentence movement, moreover, Dionysius thinks to be more important than the choice of words.[5] He supports this assertion first by analyzing a passage from the _Odyssey_.[6] Everybody would, I am sure, testify that these lines cast a spell of enchantment on the ear, and rank second to no poetry whatsoever, however exquisite it may be. But what is the secret of their fascination, and what causes them to be what they are? Is it the choice of words or the sentence movement? No one will say “the choice”; of that I am convinced. For the diction consists, warp and woof, of the most ordinary, the humblest words, such as might have been used off-hand by a farmer, a seaman, an artisan, or anybody else who takes no account of elegant speech. You have only to break up the meter, and these same lines seem commonplace and unworthy of admiration. For they contain neither noble metaphors nor _hypallages_ nor _catachreses_ nor any other figurative language; nor yet many unusual terms, nor foreign or new-coined words. What alternative, then, is left but to attribute the beauty of the style to the sentence movement? In like manner he urges concerning a passage from Herodotus:[7] Here again no one can say that the grace of the style is due to the impressiveness and the dignity of the words. These have not been picked and chosen with studious care; they are simply the labels affixed to things by Nature. Indeed, it would perhaps have been out of place to use other and grander words. I take it, in fact, to be always necessary, whenever ideas are expressed in proper and appropriate language, that no word should be more dignified than the nature of the ideas. That there is no stately or grandiose word in the present passage, any one who likes may prove by simply changing the harmony. There are many similar passages in this author, from which it can be seen that the fascination of his style does not after all lie in the beauty of the words, but in their combination.