Or take the opening of Stevenson’s “Gossip on Romance:”—
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our minds filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or continuous thought.
The intoxication of the ideal which this gives us is so full of suggestion, it brings up so vividly the best delights that have marked our reading, that our minds are awake and alert from the start. We are not only ready but eager to go forward under the guidance of an author who has so charming a conception of what sort of a treat he should strive to give the reader.
Endings are if possible even more important, and they are carefully studied by masters of style. Take this conclusion of Lowell’s “Abraham Lincoln:”—
Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent looks of sympathy which strangers exchanged as they met that day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.
One puts down the book with that suggestively solemn phrase sounding on in the brain like the reverberation when a great bell ceases its knell for a hero.
Or re-read the brief description of the tombstone of Hester Prynne, which closes “The Scarlet Letter,” and which ends with a phrase so haunting:—
It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend, so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.”
Or take the wonderful ending of that chapter in “Vanity Fair” which gives a description of Waterloo, and in a single sentence shows its relation to the story and brings the tale into closest connection with all of history and all of human life:—
The darkness came down on field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.