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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: place upon one side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase
or a verse in French is easily distinguishable as comely or
uncomely. There is then another element of comeliness
hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of the
phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as
each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests,
echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of
rightly using these concordances is the final art in
literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all
young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was
sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for
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