I find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of lucidity and purity more and more.  It seems to me that the only function of a writer is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle thoughts easily.  But there are writers, like Browning and George Meredith, who seem to hold it a virtue to express simple thoughts obscurely.  Such writers have a wide vogue, because so many people do not value a thought unless they can feel a certain glow of satisfaction in having grasped it; and to have disentangled a web of words, and to find the bright thing lying within, gives them a pleasing feeling of conquest, and, moreover, stamps the thought in their memory.  But such readers have not the root of the matter in them; the true attitude is the attitude of desiring to apprehend, to progress, to feel.  The readers who delight in obscurity, to whom obscurity seems to enhance the value of the thing apprehended, are mixing with the intellectual process a sort of acquisitive and commercial instinct very dear to the British heart.  These bewildering and bewildered Browning societies who fling themselves upon Sordello, are infected unconsciously with a virtuous craving for “taking higher ground.”  Sordello contains many beautiful things, but by omitting the necessary steps in argument, and by speaking of one thing allusively in terms of another, and by a profound desultoriness of thought, the poet produces a blurred and tangled impression.  The beauties of Sordello would not lose by being expressed coherently and connectedly.

This is the one thing that I try with all my might to impress on boys; that the essence of all style is to say what you mean as forcibly as possible; the bane of classical teaching is that the essence of successful composition is held to be to “get in” words and phrases; it is not a bad training, so long as it is realised to be only a training, in obtaining a rich and flexible vocabulary, so that the writer has a choice of words and the right word comes at call.  But this is not made clear in education, and the result on many minds is that they suppose that the essence of good writing is to search diligently for sparkling words and sonorous phrases, and then to patch them into a duller fabric.

But I stray from my point:  all paths in a schoolmaster’s mind lead out upon the educational plain.

All that you tell me of your new surroundings is intensely interesting.  I am thankful that you feel the characteristic charm of the place, and that the climate seems to suit you.  You say nothing of your work; but I suppose that you have had no time as yet.  The mere absorbing of new impressions is a fatiguing thing, and no good work can be done until a scene has become familiar.  I will discharge your commissions punctually; don’t hesitate to tell me what you want.  I don’t do it from a sense of duty, but it is a positive pleasure for me to have anything to do for you.  I long for letters; as soon as possible send me photographs, and not merely inanimate photographs of scenes and places, but be sure that you make a part of them yourself.  I want to see you standing, sitting, reading in the new house; and give me an exact and detailed account of your day, please; the food you eat, the clothes you wear; you know my insatiable appetite for trifles.—­Ever yours,