of sentiment. Without some music in them sentences
were torpid, impracticable. To put thoughts and words so together that
there shall be a charm in the presentation of them, there needs a
lively harmony among certain faculties, a rhythm in the mind. Hence
Cicero said that to write prose well, one must be able to write verse.
The utterance of music in song or tune, in artful melody or choral
harmony, is but the consummation of a power which is ever a sweetener
in life's healthily active exhibitions, the power of sound. Nature is
alive with music. In the fields, in the air, sound is a token of life.
On high, bare, or snow-covered mountains the sense of oppression comes
in great part from the absence of sound. But stand in spring under a
broad, sapful Norway maple, leafless as yet, its every twig and spray
clad in tender green flowerets, and listen to the musical murmur of
bees above you, full of life and promise, a heavenly harmony from
unseen choristers. Here is a symbol of the creative energy, unceasing,
unseen, and ever rhythmical.

The heartier and deeper the thought, the more melody will there be in
its fit expression, and thence the higher range of style is only
reached by poets, or by men who, though poetically minded, yet lack
"the accomplishment of verse." The sudden electric injection of light
into a thought or object or sentiment--in this consists the gift
poetical, a gift which implies a sensibility so keen and select as to
kindle the light, and an intellect fine and firm enough to hold and
transmit it. A writer in whom there is no poetic feeling can hardly
rise to a style. Whoever has tried to read a play of Scribe will
understand from this why Sainte-Beuve affirms of him that he is
utterly devoid of the faculty of style (_denue de la faculte du
style_). Contrast with Scribe his fellow-countryman, the great
Moliere. Thence, Joubert says, "Many of our poets having written in
prose, ordinary style has received from them a brilliancy and
audacities which it would not have had without them. Perhaps, too,
some prose writers, who were born poets without being born versifiers,
have contributed to adorn our language, even in its familiarities,
with those riches and that pomp which until then had been the
exclusive property of the poetic idiom."

A man of poetic sensibility is one born with a sleepless eye to the
better, an ear that craves the musical, a soul that is uneasy in
presence of the defective or the incomp