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246 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
that the flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than a prone
river, and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any
declivity in its channel. The river flows because it runs down
hill, and flows the faster, the faster it descends. The reader
who expects to float downstream for the whole voyage may
well complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea
when his frail shore craft gets amidst the billows of the ocean
stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as lesser
streams to it. But if we would appreciate the flow that is in
these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page
like an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like
burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind
ourselves. There is
many a book which ripples on like a
freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill-stream sucking under a
causeway and when their authors are in the full tide of their
;
discourse, Pythagoras and Plato and Jamblichus halt beside
them. Their long, stringy, slimy sentences are of that consistency
that they naturally flow and run together. They read
as if written for military men, for men of business, there is such
a dispatch in them. Compared with these, the grave thinkers
and philosophers seem not to have got their swaddlingclothes
off;
they are slower than a Roman army in its march,
the rear camping to-night where the van camped last
night.
The wise Jamblichus eddies and gleams like a watery slough.
" How many thousands never heard the name
Of Sidney, or of Spenser, or their books ?
And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame,
And seem to bear down all the world with looks." l
The ready writer seizes the pen and shouts " Forward !
Alamo and Fanning
!
" and after rolls the tide of war. The
very walls and fences seem to travel. But the most rapid
trot is no flow after all; and thither, reader, you and I, at
least, will not follow.