and their arrangement in paragraphs that is of some importance. How are they held together? The rhetorics abundantly declare that a paragraph should be coherent, but is coherence one thing or several, one form and order of words or a number having varying effects in keeping with varying ways of seizing the attention and holding it to the subject? Looking back at the paragraph from Pater, we shall see that the second sentence makes connection with the preceding in the first two words, the third with the second in words three to five, the fourth with the third in the first two words, and the fifth with the fourth in the words "one great idea," which are related in thought to "the great principle" at the close of the fourth sentence. By this establishment of connection from sentence to sentence the paragraph moves along gently. You feel the ease of the transitions as thought slips lullingly into thought. In the following from William Marion Reedy's "Reflections" in the Mirror for August 27th, 1915, there is a much more abrupt form of sentence connection.

"The famous Forty Thieves had nothing on the officers and some of the directors of the Rock Island Railroad. They seem to have grabbed a bunch of loot at every locomotive toot' on all the lines. Inefficient public ownership in days to be will be unable to beat this kind of private ownership in the days that were. And the work of the Rock Island crooks injured not that road alone. It rises up to form the basis of a refusal of rate increase to honestly-managed railroads. One wonders if it will be quite safe to admit such men to the benefits of the honor system in one of the humane penitentiaries in which they should be incarcerated. Rock Island is worse than was Erie under Gould and Fisk, and without a Josie Mansfield in the background to give it the touch of picaresque romance."

The unity of the paragraph is not sacrified here, but the sentences are more independent, they make more positive

separate impressions, and the general tone of the paragraph is therefore less equable. Probably this way of bringing sentences together, as it has a livelier sense of action and animation, is more stimulant to the reader and more likely to sharpen his attention. Further, this less formal mode of sentence connection is more in agreement with that of ordinary speech. It is more natural and simple, and simplicity and naturalness are important things in good writing.

IV

WORDS, THEIR ASSOCIATIONS AND CONNOTATIONS

28. WHEN your friend is talking to you it is not altogether what he says, but the light in his eyes, the turn of his head, the toss of his hand that give his words life and make you understand. Should the subject of discussion happen to be a mathematical demonstration or a matter-of-fact problem in physics, it is more than likely that there will be very little light in the eyes and very little of anything else to illuminate the bare movement of the thought. Something of the same effect comes to us also from the printed page. The smile and the gesture of the speaker are the marks of the play of personality about the subject, but, as we have seen before, some subjects are almost entirely impersonal. The written word cannot have these same marks of personality, of individual feeling, cannot so evidently show or fail to show the kindling eye, but it has some distinguishing marks in that kind of its

own.

Words and phrases in themselves have a character. Some of them carry, not meaning alone, but a body of experiences. There is warmth in those experiences, and color and life, and the reader cannot be unmindful of it. They have been used in connection with things, with activities, with passions to which we have been and must again be responsive. It is a simple matter to speak of green pastures, but who that has ever listened to the reading of the

Twenty-third Psalm will hear the phrase and accept it as no more than a reporting of something that has been or is? A line in Milton has made Vallombrosa a name to stir the imagination. Mesopotamia is not simply a place or a country. It is romance and beauty and earth memory. Where in the civilized world to-day is there a man who can read the word kaiser or king or czar without a quiver of execration or loyalty or some other of the many feelings that have set men at variance since the last of July, nineteen hundred and fourteen? An emperor is, by the dictionary, merely the ruler of an empire, but while the loyal subjects of an emperor may see him as a symbol of power, of national ideals, and of national security, to many a lover of freedom he is the embodiment of more sin and misery than should ever be realized in human form. These associated ideas and sentiments that accompany the primary meanings of some words, their connotations, as they are called, are so various and so elusive, so dependent upon the particular reader's acquaintance with a word's literary and human fellowships, that they may easily betray a writer. If the end of any writing is scientific precision, the use of words that are practically without connotation is the safer. A man who is demonstrating that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides must use terms that do not fluctuate. On the other hand, if he were trying to convey an impression of the magnitude of Niagara, he would not do that successfully by reporting, however accurately, the number of gallons of water that go over the falls every minute.

29. We must look at a few words a little more closely, see what their connotations are, and learn how writers use them so as to flash to the reader's mind something more than the cold idea. The paragraph below is taken

from a powerful novel by Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute,1 a novel of college life, well worth reading by college students.

"He took a few turns on the upper deck, smoking his pipe, walking about fast, while his dinner digested. The sun went down behind the horizon in an immense bloodred nebula of mist, the sea turned from gray to dull green and then to a lifeless brown, and the Santa Rosa's lights began to glow at her quarters and at her masthead; in her stern the screw drummed and threshed monotonously, a puff of warm air reeking with the smell of hot oil came from the engine hatch, and in an instant Vandover saw again the curved roof of the immense iron-vaulted depot, the passengers on the platform staring curiously at the group around the invalid's chair, the repair gang in spotted blue overalls, and the huge white cat dozing on an empty baggage truck."

Making up from this paragraph a list of words and phrases that we can safely say are more than ideational, we shall have the following: smoking, pipe, black horizon, immense, blood-red, nebula of mist, sea, gray, dull green, lifeless brown, lights, glow, quarters, masthead, drummed, threshed, puff, warm air, reeking, smell, hot oil, staring, gang, dozing. This list is not exhaustive, and we shall pause to look at the connotative elements in only a few of the words in the list. "Immense," to begin a little way down the list, may seem at first sight a word expressive of size only, but if you measure its play upon the mind a little more carefully you will see that this is not absolute size, but size in its effect upon the feelings and the imagination. A "nebula of mist" is not a fact, not a certainty, but a mystery. It sets the mind groping into the unknown. Here it is only a screen of clouds in front By permission of Doubleday, Page & Co.

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