He had no verbiage. We do not merely mean by this that he never
used a superfluous word (which, in fact, he rarely did), but that he
kept quite clear of the hazy, half-relevant ideas which encumber meaning
and are the chief source of prolixity. He threw away every idea that did
not decidedly help on his argument, and expressed the others in the
fewest words that would make them clear. He began at once where the pith
of his argument began; and had the secret, possessed by few writers, of
stopping the moment he was done; leaving his readers no chaff to sift
out from the simple wheat. This perfect absence of cloudy irrelevance
and encumbering superfluity was one source of his popularity as a
writer. His readers had to devour no husks to get at the kernel of what
he meant.
Besides these negative recommendations, Mr. Greeley's style had positive
merits of a very high order. The source of these was in the native
structure of his mind; no training could have conferred them; and it was
his original mental qualities, and not any special culture, that pruned
his writing of verbiage and redundancies. Whatever he saw, he saw with
wonderful distinctness. Whether it happened to be a sound idea or a
crotchet, it stood before his mind with the clearness of an object in
sunlight. He never groped at and around it, like one feeling in the
dark. He saw on which side he could lay hands on it at once with the
firmest grasp. It was his vividness of conception which made Mr.
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