In front the sea was spread, a smiling jailer, but even more incorruptible than the frowning mountains. - O. Henry

It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.

He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that if he had used the phrases: “Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward — or rather laterally — in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,” and “Now, returning — or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit” — I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination.