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Thirdly, there is in certain poems an undue predilection for the dramatic form; and in these cases either the thoughts and diction are different from those of the poet, so that there arises an incongruity of style, or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism.

Shorter would have had a title and a salon in the Faubourg: in the twentieth, she was the wife of a most fashionable and successful real estate agent in New York, and was aware of no incongruity.

"Metrical verse," says Miss Lowell in the Preface to Can Grande's Castle, "has one set of laws, cadenced verse another; 'polyphonic prose' can go from one to the other in the same poem with no sense of incongruity.... I finally decided to base my form upon the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose.

My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.

The dirt and gloom of French apartments, even at Versailles, offend his English standard of comfort. "After all, it is in England only where we must look for cheerful apartments, gay furniture, neatness, and convenience. There is a strange incongruity in the French genius.

Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother's face. “It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!” “And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child's observation; but, on second thoughts, turning pale. “What has the letter to do with any heart, save mine?”

When he went almost mechanically to the piano on the last afternoon, all these slumbering forces wakened in him found vent in a rhapsody of synagogue melody to which he abandoned himself, for once forgetting his audience. When gradually he became aware of the incongruity, it did but intensify his inspiration. Let the heathen rats wallow in Hebrew music!

All comprehension is creation; the woman I love is somewhat of my handiwork; and the great lover, like the great painter, is he that can so embellish his subject as to make her more than human, whilst yet by a cunning art he has so based his apotheosis on the nature of the case that the woman can go on being a true woman, and give her character free play, and show littleness, or cherish spite, or be greedy of common pleasures, and he continue to worship without a thought of incongruity.

No perplexity arises from the difference between the accounts, for there is only difference, not incongruity: the two tell more than the one; it is from the nature of the added circumstances that it springs, for those circumstances necessarily involve inquiries of the most difficult nature. Nor can I in the least pretend to have satisfied myself concerning them.

Only thus could one become morally perfect! Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical suggestion a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his literal words the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity, fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is a serious meaning that, like murder, will out.