Let me begin with prose, which, merely as a pleasurable art, instinct has urged me, from my earliest days, to cultivate. Of what good prose is I have always had clear notions; and, whether I have been successful in my efforts to achieve it or not, my personal experience of the process may not be without some interest. My own experience is that the composition of good prose--prose that seems good to myself--is a process which requires a very great deal of leisure. True excellence in prose, so I have always felt, involves many subtle qualities which are appreciable by the reader through their final effects alone, which leave no trace of the efforts spent in producing them, but which without such effort could rarely be produced at all. As examples of these qualities I may mention a melody not too often resonant, which captivates the reader's attention, and is always producing a mood in him conducive to a favorable reception of what the writer is anxious to convey. Next to such melody I should put a logical adaptation of stress, or of emphasis in the construction of sentences, which corresponds in detail to the movements of the reader's mind--a halt in the words occurring where the mind halts, a new rapidity in the words when the mind, satisfied thus far, is prepared to resume its progress. To these qualities, as essential to perfection in prose, I might easily add others; but these are so complex and comprehensive that they practically imply the rest. With regard, then, to these essentials, the practice which I have had to adopt in my own efforts to produce them has been more or less as follows. The general substance of what I proposed to say I have written out first in the loosest language possible, without any regard to melody, to accuracy, or even to correct grammar. I have then rewritten this matter, with a view, not to any verbal improvement, but merely to the rearrangement of ideas, descriptions, or arguments, so that this may accord with the sequence of questions, expectations, or emotions which are likely, by a natural logic, to arise in the reader's mind--nothing being said too soon, nothing being said too late, and nothing (except for the sake of deliberate emphasis) being said twice over. The different paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze, but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one, till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The task of thus carving each and fitting it to its next-door neighbors has always been, merely for its own sake, exceedingly fascinating to myself, but it has generally been long and slow. Most of my own books, when their general substance had been roughly got into order by means of