heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful essayist, who had
involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant intricacy. "Don't
be afraid," said the Professor, "of letting the bones show." That
is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely dry
bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with delicate flesh and
appropriate muscle; but the structure must be there, and it must be
visible.

The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as
Newman's Apologia or Ruskin's Praeterita, seems to resemble a
crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its
pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are
transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though
the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve
and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite
transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation
that glimmers and sways beneath the surface. How dry, how
commonplace the pebbles on the edge look! How stiff and ruinous the
plants from which the water has receded! But seen through the
hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret and remote
mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of rock,
the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding
stream! What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of
gentle tranquillity, it all gives!

Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style. The
objects by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air,
are trivial and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one's hand,
one seems to have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged
beneath that clear and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness,