A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

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 despatch 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,
Henry David Thoreau
79
And seem to bear down all the world with looks.”
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.
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.
For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the
thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the
morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without
their azure. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps,
not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken
firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right to know
what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well
learned. Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied if only for
the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst
of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in his style,
like a man’s tread, and a breathing space between the sentences,
which the best of modern writing does not furnish.
His chapters are like English parks, or say rather like a Western
forest, where the larger growth keeps down the