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thetic, or in that of the bold, vehement and denunciatory. In such affectionate and affecting conferences as Charles Lamb held with his beloved sister Mary; or as Wordsworth held with his equally beloved Dorothy; in the gentle, reserved and touching essays of Irving and Goldsmith; in such impressive passages as Dickens' death of little Nell or Miss Mulock's scenes of domestic life; in the recorded interviews between Charlotte Brontë and her sisters Emily and Anne; in some of the scenes portrayed in Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom," or in the sympathetic appeals of Helen Jackson on behalf of the ill-treated Indian-we note this manifestation of the passionate style on its plaintive and persuasive side; potent over us as we read it because so unassuming and delicate in its expression, gradually enlisting our interest and sympathies as the narative goes on, until we sit entranced and captivated.

Most of the Shakespearean female characters, as Mrs. Jameson has so beautifully presented them, illustrate this softer and sweeter type of feeling, while in the spacious realm of English fiction Sir Walter Scott has furnished us with feminine characters, not a few, in whom this gentleness of person and manner has assumed its most fascinating forms.

Of the more declarative and open type of the impassioned in style, literary history has abundant examples. We see it in the trenchant Ciceronian orations against Catiline; in the fiery Philippics

of Demosthenes; in the almost unearthly utterances of the great Italian Savonarola, as he contended for the purity of the church of his day; in the intrepid attacks of Luther upon the papacy and his matchless deliverances at the Diet of Worms; in the spoken and written words of the dauntless John Knox; in the heated language of Gambetta, the great Gallic diplomat; in the almost withering invectives of Garrison and Wendell Phillips, in their courageous defence of the abolition of slavery-in a word, in all those recorded utterances in which, from time to time, the defenders of vital principles and ideas have taken their lives in their hands, and under the deepest convictions of the truth and their missions to the world, have written what they have written in tears and blood. Such men have written passionately because they have thought and lived and worked passionately, with the deepest intensity of which their natures were capable, if so be their language might find its way past all opposition and affront, into the most secret and interior convictions of men. Such an order of style, provided it be under the safe control of judgment, and not offensive to literary taste, is, in its place, as representative as any, and as needful, and, in one or other of its forms, as reserved or outspoken, must find a place in all effective address.

If it be asked, at this point, how such a measure of feeling may be secured by the writer, we answer, that, personal temperament apart, nothing will so readily and fully induce it, as the continuous study

of scenes and events calculated to elicit it in its varied phases of pity, sympathy, indignation and enthusiasm. The practical results of such a method are strikingly exhibited in the history of the great Crusades of the Middle Ages, when the hundreds of thousands of valiant warriors who marched under their leaders to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the ravages of the infidels were incited to such bravery and perils by their protracted contemplation of those indignities of which the cross of Christ was made the subject. We may say, in the language of the Psalmist, that "their heart was hot within them." While they were "musing the fire burned "-the fire of passion, of holy indignation and holy enthusiasm, insomuch that they rose from their meditations ready to march and to suffer, to fight and to perish, in the defence of the truth and the cross. Meditation upon impassioned objects and incidents is the fruitful mother of passion in our own souls, and when once awakened, must, despite all opposition, manifest itself in word and act.

Hence, the reading of what may be called, the literature of feeling, is in the direct line of the education of such feeling. No writer in the formation of his style, however lethargic his nature, can studiously peruse the best specimens of emotional narrative, description, argument and oration, as they exist in English Letters, and not feel their quickening influence.

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Certainly I must confess," writes Sir Philip

Sidney in his "Apologue," "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." So, also, will he feel who hears or reads the words of those who have said what they have said from the innermost depths of their hearts, in order to reach and affect the heart of others. "Passion," writes Shakespeare, "is catching."

The impassioned style, we may add, is "catching." It passes by an instinctive process from orator to hearer; from author to reader, and as others weep or laugh, denounce or praise, we speak and act in common with them. It is the philosophical law of natural affinity and of mutual influence applied in the province of literature and style. If, as Doctor Johnson tells us-"Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar and elegant must give his days and nights to the study of Addison," so, may we say, in the light of our present discussion, that-Whoever wishes to attain an English style, impressive and impassioned, must spend his days and nights with such intensive authors as Milton and De Quincey, Burke and Carlyle, Patrick Henry and Daniel Webster.

II. The Element of Personality. This is an element common to all the species of style-intellectual, literary and popular-and, yet, especially adapted to the style Impassioned. If, as we are told, the style is the man, then, in the style before us, the human or personal element is more con

spicuous than in any other. It is a style in which, as in no other, there is the fullest external revelation of the inner man. So pronounced is this individual element in the written expression of thought and life, that there is a racial and national personality in literature clearly visible along the line of the world's great civilizations. In North European countries, as in Germany and Denmark, this assumes a distinctive type, as vigorous, rugged and undemonstrative; while in all South European countries, literary personality, as national personality, is impassioned. Hence, the style is full of what might be called a tropical fervor, so that in prose and poetry, in social life and common speech, all is expressive and emotional. No French philosopher illustrates such a passionate personality in his style more happily than Monsieur Cousin. Whether in his metaphysical, ethical or miscellaneous discussions, there is the same Gallic vivacity and spirit. In his attractive treatise on" The True and the Beautiful" deep æsthetic sensibility could scarcely be more pronounced and sympathetic. He writes as if in love with truth and beauty, so as to regard them with Keats, as one and the same inner quality of life and of letters. Victor Hugo, in fiction, and Madame de Staël, in general literature, exemplify a similar intensity and purity of feeling; while Fenelon, in his "Telemaque" and Pascal, in his "Thoughts" and "Provincial Letters", always write from the innermost recesses of their natures, and thus write emotionally. The same order of ex

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