Valuable as the study of rhetoric undoubtedly is, it can go but a
little way in making you successful writers. I think I have got
more help as an author from going a-fishing than from any textbook
or classbook I ever looked into. Miss Lawrence will not thank me for
encouraging you to play truant, but if you take Bacon's or Emerson's
or Arnold's or Cowley's essays with you and dip into them now and
then while you are waiting for the fish to bite, she will detect
some fresh gleam in your composition when next you hand one in.

There is no way to learn style so sure as by familiarity with nature,
and by study of the great authors. Shakespeare can teach you all
there is to be learned of the art of expression, and the rhetoric
of a live trout leaping and darting with such ease and sureness
cannot well be beaten.

What you really have in your heart, what you are in earnest about,
how easy it is to say that!

Miss Lawrence says you admire my essay on the strawberry. Ah! but
I loved the strawberry--I loved the fields where it grew, I loved
the birds that sang there, and the flowers that bloomed there, and
I loved my mother who sent me forth to gather the berries; I loved
all the rural sights and sounds, I felt near them, so that when, in
after years, I came to write my essay I had only to obey the old
adage which sums up all of the advice which can be given in these
matters, "Look in thy heart and write."

The same when I wrote about the apple. I had apples in my blood and
bones. I had not ripened them in the haymow and bitten them under
the seat and behind my slate so many times in school for nothing.