Longtime readers of this column will know of my almost reverent admiration for the work of E.B. White. For many years he was best known for his short pieces in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” He wrote “The Death of a Pig” and “The Second Tree From the Corner.” He wrote of a spider named Charlotte and a mouse named Stuart Little. With Will Strunk he wrote “The Elements of Style.” He turned out some lovely verse.

More to the point of today’s reflections, in 1948 White wrote a piece for Holiday magazine, “Here Is New York.” It was a 7,500-word serenade to the city he loved. In 1999, marking the centennial of White’s birth, the essay was reprinted in a slim volume published by The Little Bookstore on St. Luke’s Place in Manhattan. A thoughtful friend just gave me a copy. I haven’t had a more pleasant present in years.

The Holiday piece was vintage White – one apparently effortless sentence after another, beautiful stuff, never pretentious, deceptively casual. Like every professional, White regarded writing not as “fun,” but as damned hard work. His trick was never to let us see him sweat.

In the Holiday piece, he backed into his lead sentence: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”

I don’t mean to break a butterfly upon a wheel, but that sentence may usefully be dissected. It provides a small introduction to the anatomy of prose composition.

Note White’s neat use of inversion: He could have marched into the sentence with its elements in single file: subject, verb, direct object: “New York will bestow the gift,” and so on. Instead he tried a diversionary phrase: “On any person who desires …” He hooked his readers on the lure of “such queer prizes.” These metaphorical prizes are not “unusual” or “remarkable” or “strange” or “odd.” They were “queer,” and the unexpected adjective focuses our attention.

For many writers, repetition is a hobgoblin. Their fictional characters will announce, blurt, cry, demand – their people will do anything but say, say, say. White had no fear of the specter. He positively embraced it. In this regard, he could have trimmed a little fat from his first paragraph. If he had bestowed simply “the gifts of loneliness and privacy,” he would have saved three words – and lost the cadence.

Halfway into the Holiday piece, he recalls an early morning flight into New York. He feels the city’s upward thrust: “the great walls and towers rising, the heat not yet rising, the hopes and ferments of so many awakening millions rising – this vigorous spear that presses heaven hard.”

White follows that burst of lyricism with a popped balloon of truth: “It’s a miracle that New York works at all.” We come back down to Earth. The thin air of eulogy can only briefly be sustained. Especially for outlanders, he remarks, New York can be a series of disappointments and put-downs. The visitor may not be able to distinguish “between a sucker joint and a friendly saloon.”

White wrote his rhapsody as Gershwin wrote his. He tinkers with a phrase largo, followed by a coda pizzicato; first a lyric passage for strings, then a solo for kazoo.

In White’s essay, students of the writing art will find all our little tricks of window-dressing casually displayed. He could start with a ribbon and end with a gown. Because he knew the rules, he knew when they usefully may be broken. Like all the rest of us in the writing game, he could throw to the wrong base or let a grounder slip through he legs. He had a lively prejudice against such limp modifiers as “rather” and “very,” but he employed them here. He speculated that someday the city would blow up “higher than a kite.” Even Homer nodded. White kept us awake.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.