mall space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I take
its materials apart and work them over and put them together in my way,
I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not
being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk: he
can get the things out, but he can't ever get them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the
article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words. The sample is
just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is,
it holds no superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay.
Also, the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not lonely; there
is a plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is
claiming much when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like
the one in the middle sentence: "an idealist immersed in realities who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like
the visionary issues of reverie." With a hundred words to do it with,
the literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and
reduce it to a concrete condition, visible, substantial, understandable
and all right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and
the result is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same
source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of
us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the
words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they
all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that
makes their message take hold.

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it.
The words are all "right" words, and all the same size. We do not notice
it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we
do not know why. It is when the right words are conspicuous that they
thunder:

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!

When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging
and clustering English words well, but not any better than now. He
is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in
translating, then, the visions of the eyes of fle