The sculptor and the architect deal in less perishable ware, but
the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not take the
impress of all states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and
aesthetic, mood and conviction, creed and whim, habit, passion, and
demonstration--what art but the art of literature admits the
entrance of all these, and guards them from the suddenness of
mortality? What other art gives scope to natures and dispositions
so diverse, and to tastes so contrarious? Euclid and Shelley,
Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer, King David and David Hume, are
all followers of the art of letters.

In the effort to explain the principles of an art so bewildering in
its variety, writers on style have gladly availed themselves of
analogy from the other arts, and have spoken, for the most part,
not without a parable. It is a pleasant trick they put upon their
pupils, whom they gladden with the delusion of a golden age, and
perfection to be sought backwards, in arts less complex. The
teacher of writing, past master in the juggling craft of language,
explains that he is only carrying into letters the principles of
counterpoint, or that it is all a matter of colour and perspective,
or that structure and ornament are the beginning and end of his
intent. Professor of eloquence and of thieving, his winged shoes
remark him as he skips from metaphor to metaphor, not daring to
trust himself to the partial and frail support of any single
figure. He lures the astonished novice through as many trades as
were ever housed in the central hall of the world's fair. From his
distracting account of the business it would appear that he is now
building a monument, anon he is painting a picture (with brushes
dipped in a gallipot made of an earthquake); again he strikes a
keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire, drives a nail, treads a