The development of English prose style Author:Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 34 The Development of English Prose Style. " Silence as of death ; for midnight even in the Arctic latitudes 'has its character; nothing but the granite cliff... more »s ruddy tinged, ' and the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar ocean ; over ' which in the utmost north the great sun hangs low and lazy, as ' if he too were slumbering. Yet is his cloud couch wrought of ' crimson and cloth of gold ; yet does his light stream over the ' mirror of waters like a tremulous fire-pillar, starting downwards ' to the abyss, and hide itself under my feet. In such moments ' solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak or be looked ' upon when behind him lies all Europ and Africa fast asleep, ' except the watchmen, and before him the silent immensity and ' palace of the Eternal, whereof our sun is but a porch-lamp." I have ventured to give this quotation at some length, because it is a really good specimen of what Mr. Carlyle's style is capable of when he is least led astray by eccentricity. But even here he indulges in a peculiarly inverted order of words, and an omission of verbs, which, though striking and pictorial, is unpleasing to an educated English ear. The guidance which our best modern prose writers are following is a different one from this of Mr. Carlyle; there is hardly a book published, by anyone who can be considered at all qualified to be an author, which does not make use of chaste and even diction, and a perspicuous arad terse grammatical construction. To such an end all the changes which have been effected throughout the history of English prose literature have been directed ; there has been one constant effort to make diction simpler, while preserving its purity, and to make sentences comprehensible without sacrificing grammar to the desire for pictorial effect. ...« less