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buttressing a phrase, or linking two together, with a patch of
assonance or a momentary jingle of alliteration. To understand how
constant is this preoccupation of good writers, even where its
results are least obtrusive, it is only necessary to turn to the
bad. There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, the rattle of
incongruous consonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus,
and whole phrases not to be articulated by the powers of man.
Conclusion.--We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.
We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his
phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever
allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the
versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double,
treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre--
harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully
combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be
musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a
texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods--but this
particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to
both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.
We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect
passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must
be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it
should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of
according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to
the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a
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