The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as Newman’s Apologia or Ruskin’s Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the surface.  How dry, how commonplace the pebbles on the edge look!  How stiff and ruinous the plants from which the water has receded!  But seen through the hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret and remote mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of rock, the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding stream!  What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of gentle tranquillity, it all gives!

Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style.  The objects by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air, are trivial and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one’s hand, one seems to have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged beneath that clear and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness, a sweetness which seem the result of a magical spell, an incommunicable influence; they bring all heaven before the eyes; they whisper the secrets of a region which is veritably there, which we can discern and enjoy, but the charm of which we can neither analyse nor explain; we can only confess its existence with a grateful heart.  One who devotes himself to writing should find, then, his chief joy in the practice of his art, not in the rewards of it; publication has its merits, because it entails upon one the labour of perfecting the book as far as possible; if one wrote without publication in view, one would be tempted to shirk the final labour of the file; one would leave sentences incomplete, paragraphs unfinished; and then, too, imperfect as reviews often are, it is wholesome as well as interesting to see the impression that one’s work makes on others.  If one’s work is generally contemned, it is bracing to know that one fails in one’s appeal, that one cannot amuse and interest readers.  High literature has often met at first with unmerited neglect and even obloquy; but to incur neglect and obloquy is not in itself a proof that one’s standard is high and one’s taste fastidious.  Moreover, if one has done one’s best, and expressed sincerely what one feels and believes, one sometimes has the true and rare pleasure of eliciting a grateful letter from an unknown person, who has derived pleasure, perhaps even encouragement, from a book.  These are some of the pleasant rewards of writing, and though one should not write with one’s eye on the rewards, yet they may be accepted with a sober gratitude.