Beside me, as I wrote,
an Arab looked carefully at every word and shook his head because he
could not understand the language; but the Muses understood and
Apollo, which were its authors almost as much as I. How graceful it
was and yet how firm! How generous and yet how particular! How easy,
how superb, and yet how stuffed with dignity! There ran through it,
half-perceived and essential, a sort of broken rhythm that never
descended to rhetoric, but seemed to enliven and lift up the order
of the words until they were filled with something approaching
music; and with all this the meaning was fixed and new, the order
lucid, the adjectives choice, the verbs strong, the substantives
meaty and full of sap. It combined (if I may say so with modesty)
all that Milton desired to achieve, with all that Bacon did in the
modelling of English.... And it is gone. It will never be seen or
read or known at all. It has utterly disappeared nor is it even
preserved in any human memory--no, not in my own.
I kept it for a year, closely filing, polishing, and emending it
until one would have thought it final, and even then I continued to
develop and to mould it. It grew like a young tree in the corner of
a fruitful field and gave an enduring pleasure.
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