Surely The Writer Is To Address A World Of
Laborers, And Such Therefore Must Be His Own Discipline.
He will
not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before
nightfall in the
Short days of winter; but every stroke will be
husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the
strokes of that scholar's pen, which at evening record the story
of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader,
long after the echoes of his axe have died away. The scholar may
be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his
palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind
never makes a great and successful effort, without a
corresponding energy of the body. We are often struck by the
force and precision of style to which hard-working men,
unpractised in writing, easily attain when required to make the
effort. As if plainness, and vigor, and sincerity, the ornaments
of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop,
than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands
are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the
deer, or the roots of the pine. As for the graces of expression,
a great thought is never found in a mean dress; but though it
proceed from the lips of the Woloffs, the nine Muses and the
three Graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase.
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