If a writer does not bring a new thought, he must at least bring a new quality,--he must give a fresh, new flavor to the old thoughts. Style or quality will keep a man’s work alive whose thought is essentially commonplace, as is the case with Addison; and Arnold justly observes of the poet Gray that his gift of style doubles his force and “raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and power seem to warrant.” There is the correct, conventional, respectable and scholarly use of language of the mass of writers, and there is the fresh, stimulating, quickening use of it of the man of genius. How apt and racy and telling is often the language of unlettered persons; the born writer carries this same gift into a higher sphere. There is a passage in one of Emerson’s early letters, written when he was but twenty-four, and given by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, which shows how clearly at that age Emerson discerned the secret of good writing and good preaching. “I preach half of every Sunday. When I attended church on the other half of a Sunday, and the image in the pulpit was all of clay, and not of tunable metal, I said to myself that if men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what is uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.... But whatever properties a man of narrow intellect feels to be peculiar he studiously hides; he is ashamed or afraid of himself, and all his communications to men are unskillful plagiarisms from the common stock of thought and knowledge, and he is of course flat and tiresome.” The great mass of the writing and sermonizing of any age is of the kind here indicated; it is the result of the machinery of culture and of books and the schools put into successful operation. But now and then a man appears whose writing is vital; his page may be homely, but it is alive; it is full of personal magnetism. The writer does not merely give us what he thinks or knows; he gives us himself. There is nothing secondary or artificial between himself and his reader. It is books of this kind that mankind does not willingly let die. Some minds are like an open fire,--how direct and instant our communication with them; how they interest us; there are no screens or disguises; we see and feel the vital play of their thought; we are face to face with their spirits. Indeed all good literature, whether poetry or prose, is the open fire; there is directness, reality, charm; we get something at first-hand that warms and stimulates.