has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway from one to
another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those lips!"
The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the writings
of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have instances of
widely different and largely diffused phases of religious feeling in
operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind acts with
similar power in certain writers of quite other than theological
literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar sense of
theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature, this
quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At
their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";
such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter,
but of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with,
peculiar form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic
contact, on which account it is that it may be called soul, as
opposed to mind, in style. And this too is a faculty of choosing and
rejecting what is congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity-
-unity of atmosphere here, as there of design--soul securing colour
(or perfume, might [27] we say?) as mind secures form, the latter
being essentially finite, the former vague or infinite, as the
influence of a living person is practically infinite. There are some
to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as
operative in a given person; and it is they who best appreciate the
quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a
book, and make way by intuition: yet, although they thus enjoy the
completeness of a personal information, it is still a characteristic
of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can
never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than,
what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of
which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed.