conscious, you may imitate the ingenious persons who carefully avoid the
natural word, the spontaneous phrase, and employ some other set of terms
which can hardly be construed. You may use, like a young essayist whom I
have lovingly observed, a proportion of eighty adjectives to every sixty-
five other words of all denominations. You may hunt for odd words, and
thrust them into the wrong places, as where you say that a man's nose is
"beetling," that the sun sank in "a cauldron of daffodil chaos," and the
like. {2} You may use common words in an unwonted sense, keeping some
private interpretation clearly before you. Thus you may speak, if you
like to write partly in the tongue of Hellas, about "assimilating the
_ethos_" of a work of art, and so write that people shall think of the
processes of digestion. You may speak of "exhausting the beauty" of a
landscape, and, somehow, convey the notion of sucking an orange dry. Or
you may wildly mix your metaphors, as when a critic accuses Mr. Browning
of "giving the irridescence of the poetic afflatus," as if the poetic
afflatus were blown through a pipe, into soap, and produced soap bubbles.
This is a more troublesome method than the mere picking up of every
newspaper commonplace that floats into your mind, but it is equally
certain to lead--where you want to go. By combining the two fashions a
great deal may be done. Thus you want to describe a fire at sea, and you
say, "the devouring element lapped the quivering spars, the mast, and the
sea-shouldering keel of the doomed _Mary Jane_ in one coruscating
catastrophe. The sea deeps were incarnadined to an alarming extent by
the flames, and to escape from such many plunged headlong in their watery
bier."

As a rule, authors who would fail stick to one bad sort of writing;
either to the newspaper commonplace, or to the out of the way and
inappropriate epithets, or to the common word with a twist on it. But
there are examples of the combined method, as when we call the trees