Style

If a person admires a particular method of arranging words, that arrangement will occur naturally in his own diction, without malice aforethought.  Some writers unconsciously fall into the mode of expression adopted by others.  This illustrates a similarity of disposition, and is not imitation.  As a style, when it is natural, comes rather from the heart than the head, men of similar tastes and feelings will be likely to fall into a similar form of expression.

-       Edwin P. Whipple[1]

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[1] Edwin Percy Whipple born in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1819. A powerful essayist, for a time he was the main literary critic for Philadelphia-based Graham’s Magazine. Later, in 1848, he became the Boston correspondent to the Literary World under Evert Augustus Duyckinck and George Long Duyckinck. Historian Perry Miller called Edwin “Boston’s most popular critic.”

He was a close friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne. After Hawthorne’s death in 1864, Whipple served as a pallbearer alongside Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Thomas Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Edwin died in 1886 and was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.