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Essays by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell
page 40 of 206 (19%)
develop within definite limits; but he does not subject himself to
suggestions tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents of
various race within one literature. Such a choice of subjection is the
singular opportunity of the Englishman. I do not mean to ignore the
necessary mingling. Happily that mingling has been done once for all for
us all. Nay, one of the most charming things that a master of English
can achieve is the repayment of the united teaching by linking their
results so exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools
are made to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall prove
them at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world knew
they were. Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as to which
school of words shall have the place of honour in the great and sensitive
moments of an author's style: which school shall be used for
conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service. And the choice
being open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses of so many hearts
quickened in thought and feeling in this day suggests to me a deliberate
return to the recollectedness of the more tranquil language. "Doubtless
there is a place of peace."

A place of peace, not of indifference. It is impossible not to charge
some of the moralists of the eighteenth century with an indifference into
which they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudes
educated them. Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapable
of coming within arm's-length of a real or spiritual emotion. There is
no knowing to what distance the removal of the "appropriate sentiment"
from the central soul might have attained but for the change and renewal
in language, which came when it was needed. Addison had assuredly
removed eternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Cato
hailed the "pleasing hope," the "fond desire"; and the touch of war was
distant from him who conceived his "repulsed battalions" and his
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