Why shouldst thou come then to my window pane To wring thy hands and weep, and sore complain That they alone all sad and cold must lie In wet, dark graves, and we breathe not a sigh? We have forgot. The quick and dead are twain, Oh, wild, loud wind! September 6. Verbal Magic. J---- was reading me parts of his new book in manuscript to-day, and I objected that it lacked style. "Why, all the successful writers tell me that style is unnecessary," he said in an injured tone. "D---- says he just writes ahead and pays no attention to it. He says that the laboriousness of Stevenson and Flaubert has 'gone out' and the public are bored by it. And just see how successful D---- is!" What was one to say? I merely tried to look convinced and begged him to continue. And yet Emerson said that when the distraught Hamlet cried to the mailed spirit of his father, "What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?" he was so possessed by the verbal magic of the phrase that he could attend no more to the rest of the play. Perhaps it is some penetrating assonance in that "complete steel"--in those sibilant repetitions of "revisit'st thus the glimpses"--that makes its witchery. Poe carefully analyzed the science of it--which is no science at all, but the inscrutable magic of inspiration. Such lines as "Came up through the lair of the lion With love in her luminous eyes" are built upon that theory of liquid consonants and open vowels, and it has no magic at all, while "To Annie"--which was written without conscious plan--is full of it. "Her grand family funerals" is instinct with that prickling delight of the magic of words, as is "the wizard rout" of the bodiless airs that blew through her "casement open to the night." Tennyson's famous alliteration, "The moaning of doves in immemorial elms And the murmur of innumerable bees" lacks glamour. One scents the intention. "Ay! Ay! oh ay! The wind that blows the brier" recaptures the elusive charm, because of its wild, unconscious lyrism. Fancy these absurd, ignorant young writers talking of style having "gone out"! Apparently they suppose it means "fine writing," in which nothing is more lacking than style. The essence of style, I suppose, is in the inspired, instinctive choice of words which present suddenly to the mind a _picture_ of what the writer is talking about. The whole _clou_ of Hamlet's phrase is that "glimpses of the moon." It makes one see the vague, intangible momentariness of the apparition. Sir Thomas Browne's famous "drums and tramplings of three conquests" gives just that flashing picture of the banners and rolling sounds of those long vanished invasions. And Keats's "Casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn" presents the indescribable to the eye.