I would have the author take no thought of his style, as such;
yet if his sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so
much the better. Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and
spontaneously out of the subject, or out of the writer's mind,
how it takes us!
My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It
took me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe,
if I have ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I
really saw and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my
writing when I see it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my
sentences glance off and fail to reach the quick.
[In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown,
after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The
lake and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them
forty-six years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered.
Of the old seminary only the foundations were standing, and the
trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place. I again
dipped my oar in the lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and
threaded some of the streets I had known so well. I wished I could
have been alone there. . . . I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke
the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the
presence of strangers.
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