The sentence gives pleasant sense of slipping quietly into a blue, smiling harbor, after storm.
Stevenson performed miracles in handling sound. His verse, however, was merely graceful, which is a word good to apply to him.
Lafcadio Hearn was another master of the same kind, working with a sentence-line of keener, sharper, spirit-winged beauty. Few literatures of the world can show anything to surpass Hearn at his best.
It is possible to diagram with something approaching accuracy the effect of a sentence upon the muscles of the body.
A fine sentence is a geometrical sound-picture affecting the body as line affects the eye, built up out of vowels, soft padding of consonants packed between, to keep them from bruising each other in their expanding ecstacy, their lift, their lyric laugh.
The greatest rhythms are personal rhythms, that conform to no rule save deeps of self, consciousness of world-currents, the moment’s inspired emotion.
Lafcadio Hearn is a delicate, learned, vowel-musician. No language has a master who surpasses him. Listen to this, (I quote from memory): “So I wait for the poet’s Pentecost, the inspiration of nature, the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten and the Sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshipper, with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds.”
Learned, exquisite, infinitely wise in construction. He has worked magic.
Hear this from Aristophanes: “Our splendid dithyrambs are misty and duskyish, and dark gleaming, and high flown.”