The complete works of W.E. Channing Volume 4

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 Excerpt: ...threatened to supplant good wr.zir.z in this cc-ntry. intended to be elegant, but fell into jc;uneness and ir_f:;.city. It delighted in words and arra elements of words which were little soiled by common use. and rr.istook a?pr_ce neatness for grace. We had a Procrustes bed for sentences, and there seemed to be a settled war between the style of writing and the free style of conversation. Times, we think, have changed. Men have learned more to write as they speak, and are ashamed to dress up familiar thoughts as if ihey were just arrived from a far country and could not appear in public without a foreign and studied attire They have learned that common words are common, precisely because most fitted to express real feeling and strong conception, and that the circuitous, measured phraseology, which was called elegance, was but the parade of weakness. They have learned that words are the signs of thought, and worthless counterfeits without it, and that style is good when, instead of being anxiously cast into a mould, it seems a free and natural expression of thought, and gives to us with power the workings of the author's mind We have been led to make these remarks on the style which in a degree marks the book before us, from a persuasion that this mode of writing has been particularly injurious to religion, and to rational religion. It has crept into sermons, perhaps, more than into any other compositions, and has imbued them with that soporific quality which they have sometimes been found to possess in an eminent degree. How many hearers have been soothed by a smooth, watery flow of words, a regular chime of sentences, and elegantly rocked into repose! We are aware that preachers, above all writers, are excusable for this style, because it is the easiest; a...