Milton understood the secret of memory perfectly well, and his poems are
full of those little pitfalls for the fancy. Whatever you have read,
whether in the classics, or in medieval romance, all is there to stir
you with an emotion not always the less strong because indefinable. Gray
makes use of the same artifice, and with the same success.
There is a charm in the arrangement of words also, and that not only in
verse, but in prose. The finest prose is subject to the laws of metrical
proportion. For example, in the song of Deborah and Barak: "Awake,
awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, utter a song! Arise, Barak, and lead thy
captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam!" Or again, "At her feet he
bowed; he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he
bowed, there he fell down dead."
Setting aside, then, all charm of association, all the influence to
which we are unconsciously subjected by melody, by harmony, or even by
the mere sound of words, we may say that style is distinguished from
manner by the author's power of projecting his own emotion into what he
writes. The stylist is occupied with the impression which certain things
have made upon him; the mannerist is wholly concerned with the
impression he shall make on others.
III. KALEVALA
But there are also two kinds of imagination, or rather two ways in which
imagination may display itself--as an active power or as a passive
quality of the mind.
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