The conventions which serve efficiently to convey ordinary ideas and matter-of-fact statements, are not sufficient for the expression of emotions. The man who has to tell the price of pigs and potatoes, the amount of coal consumed in a locomotive engine, or the effect of political complications upon the stock-market, is able to serve himself sufficiently well with ordinary language. The novelist who has to tell of the bewitchingly willful worldliness of Beatrix Esmond, of the fateful and tragic experiences of Donatello and Miriam, the splendidly real impossibilities of the career of D'Artagnan and his three friends, the passion of Richard Feverel for Lucy, of Kmita for Olenka, of Marius for Cosette; the dramatist who endeavors to make his readers share the emotions of Lear and Cordelia, of Caliban and Desdemona, of Viola and Juliet; the poet who would picture the emotions of Pompilia, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Porphyrio and Madeline, of Prometheus and Asia,--all these require an especial language. The conveying from mind to mind of emotion is a delicate task. It is not difficult to make a man understand the price of oysters, but endeavor to share with a fellow-being the secrets of a moment of transcendent feeling, and you have an undertaking so complex, and so all but impossible, that if you can perfectly succeed in it you may justly call yourself the first writer of your age. This is the making of the intangible tangible; the highest creative act of the imagination. The cleverness and the skill of man have been exhausted in devising means to impart to readers the thought and feeling, the passion and emotion, which sway the hearts of mankind. It is not necessary here to go into those devices which belong especially to the domain of rhetoric,--the mechanics of style. They are designated in the old-fashioned text-books by tongue-twisting Greek names which most of us have learned, and which all of us have forgotten. It is not with them that I am here concerned. They are meant to affect the reader unconsciously. It is with those matters which appeal to the conscious understanding that we have now to do; the conventions which are the language of literature as Latin was the language of Cæsar or Greek the tongue of Pericles.