SUGGESTIVENESS 103 



In the world of experience and observation the 

 suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, con- 

 cealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight 

 is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a roll- 

 ing field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight 

 one. In literature perspective, indirection, under- 

 statement, side glimpses, have equal value; a vocab- 

 ulary that is warm from the experience of the writer, 

 sentences that start a multitude of images, that 

 abound in the concrete and the specific, that shun 

 vague generalities, — with these goes the power of 

 suggestiveness. 



Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, 

 while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the per- 

 fected afford us a different kind of pleasure. The 

 art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and 

 the art that stimulates and makes us ahungry has 

 another. All beginnings in nature afford us a pe- 

 culiar pleasure. The early spring with its hints and 

 dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first robin 

 or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first tender 

 skies, the first rainbow, the first wild flower, the 

 dropping bud scales, the awakening voices in the 

 marshes, — all these things touch and move us in 

 a way that later developments in the season do not. 

 What meaning, too, in the sunrise and the sunset, 

 in the night with its stars, the sea with its tides and 

 currents, the morning with its dews, autumn with 

 its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its 



