There are ambrosial, honeyed, ornate words that regale us with fair visions of life, and steep the mind in dreams of romance and intoxicate with amorous delight. There are treacherous, lying words that distil murder in the air as they wing their evil flight. They strike deadly as a keen stiletto, or spit poison like a venomous adder in the grass. There are discordant words that harrow up the feelings, and there are smooth, velvety, caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds us in their thrall, and that flow on and on harmoniously like the rippling of many waters that never fall out of tune. Words cannot be measured with the measuring-reed of a man; they are spiritual forces; "they are angels of blessing or cursing. Unuttered we control them, uttered they control us." A man may have much wisdom packed into his capacious mind, but to unfold it attractively so that it glitters in the public eye and arrests attention is where the master art of handling words comes in. One secret of successful writing is to express your thoughts in as few words as possible. Be frugal in your expenditure of words as a miser over the outlay of his hoarded gold. Write clearly, tersely, compactly, for words, like coins of the realm, are most esteemed when they contain large value in little space. The more briefly a thing is said, the more brilliantly it is put. The rarest of all qualities in a writer is--measure, saying exactly as much as you mean to say and not a word more or less. If a picture is complete, everything added is something taken away. The "command of language" is often a snare of the devil into which men fall and do themselves grievous hurt. A redundancy of flowery words and empty fluency of speech confuse the thought and confound the meaning; skip half the telling and you know more of the tale. Oh the dreariness of some solid reading I have done in my time!--very learned and logical dissertations, but dulness crowned it all; even the dry bones of scientific matter clogged with technicalities can be made to live by a touch of style. Cartloads of words rumbling along the rutty road of argument slowly to their destination are not half so forceful as an apt image which flies straight to the point on wings of inspiration, and gets there first.