106 SUGGESTIVENESS 



ground; the sky and the earth, and the things in 

 them and upon them, are what you have always 

 known, and not for a moment are you called upon to 

 breathe in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright posi 

 tion to see the landscape. Dante even makes hell 

 as tangible and real as the objects of our senses, if 

 not more so. 



Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power 

 of pregnant, compact sentences, type thoughts, 

 compendious phrases, vital distinctions or gen 

 eralizations, such as we find scattered through litera 

 ture, as when De Quincey says of the Roman that 

 he was great in the presence of man, never in the 

 presence of nature; or his distinction between the 

 literature of power and the literature of knowledge, 

 or similar illuminating distinctions in the prose of 

 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Goethe, 

 Lessing. Arnold's dictum that poetry is a criticism 

 of life, is suggestive, because it sets you thinking to 

 verify or to disprove it. John Stuart Mill was not 

 what one would call a suggestive writer, yet the fol 

 lowing sentence, which Mr. Augustine Birrell has 

 lately made use of, makes a decided ripple in one's 

 mind: "I have learnt from experience that many 

 false opinions may be exchanged for true ones with 

 out in the least altering the habits of mind of which 

 false opinions are the result." In a new home writer 

 whose first books are but a year or two old, I find 

 deeply suggestive sentences on nearly every page. 



