Enough has been said in these days of the charm of fluent writing.  We hear it complained of some works of genius, that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow.  But even the mountain peaks in the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range.  We should consider that the flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than a prone river, and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any declivity in its channel.  The river flows because it runs down hill, and flows the faster the faster it descends.  The reader who expects to float down stream for the whole voyage, may well complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea when his frail shore-craft gets amidst the billows of the ocean stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as lesser streams to it.  But if we would appreciate the flow that is in these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves.  There is many a book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill-stream sucking under a causeway; and when their authors are in the full tide of their discourse, Pythagoras and Plato and Jamblichus halt beside them.  Their long, stringy, slimy sentences are of that consistency that they naturally flow and run together.  They read as if written for military men, for men of business, there is such a despatch in them.  Compared with these, the grave thinkers and philosophers seem not to have got their swaddling-clothes off; they are slower than a Roman army in its march, the rear camping to-night where the van camped last night.  The wise Jamblichus eddies and gleams like a watery slough.

    “How many thousands never heard the name
    Of Sidney, or of Spenser, or their books? 
    And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame,
    And seem to bear down all the world with looks.”

The ready writer seizes the pen, and shouts, Forward!  Alamo and Fanning! and after rolls the tide of war.  The very walls and fences seem to travel.  But the most rapid trot is no flow after all; and thither, reader, you and I, at least, will not follow.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare.  For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.  The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest.  They are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.  Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many masters.  There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not