form of expression. There arrives, in the case of one who has
practised poetical expression diligently, a wonderful sense of
freedom, of expansiveness, of delight, when he begins to use what
has been material for poetry for the purposes of prose. Poetical
expression is strictly conditioned by length of stanzas, dignity of
vocabulary, and the painful exigencies of rhyme. How good are the
days when one has escaped from all that tyranny, when one can say
the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in flowing
phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences of
poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the
sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy--these are the
joys of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to
make them easy and instinctive.

A word may be said about style. Stevenson said that he arrived at
flexibility of style by frank and unashamed imitation of other
writers; he played, as he said, "the sedulous ape" to great
authors. This system has its merits, but it also has its dangers. A
sensitive literary temperament is apt to catch, to repeat, to
perpetuate the charming mannerisms of great writers. I have
sometimes had to write critical monographs on the work of great
stylists. It is a perilous business! If for several months one
studies the work of a contagious and delicate writer, critically
and appreciatively, one is apt to shape one's sentences with a
dangerous resemblance to the cadences of the author whom one is
supposed to be criticising. More than once, when my monograph has
been completed, I have felt that it might almost have been written
by the author under examination; and there is no merit in that. I
am sure that one should not aim at practising a particular style.
The one aim should be to present the matter as clearly, as