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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: material points, literature, being a representative art, must
look for analogies to painting and the like; but in what is
technical and executive, being a temporal art, it must seek
for them in music. Each phrase of each sentence, like an air
or a recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded
out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to
gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole
judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the
secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of
those phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law
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