Here is a letter, enclosed within one to his sister Fanny on September 9, written on a scrap of paper.  The apologetic tone of confession is amusing:—­

’My dearest Father,—­I have not before told you that I have been at work for just three weeks upon a new subject; reading, however, Hebrew every day almost for three hours as well.  Schier is not a great Hebraist; and I found the language in one sense easier than I expected, so that with good grammar and dictionary I can quite get on by myself, reading an easy part of the Bible (historical books, e.g.} at the rate of about twenty-five verses an hour.  Well, I began to think that I ought to use the opportunities that Dresden affords.  I know that Hebrew is not a rich language; that many words occur only once, and consequently have an arbitrary meaning attached to them, unless they can be illustrated from cognate languages.  Now I have a taste for these things, and have in three weeks progressed so far in my new study as to feel sure I shall make it useful; and so I tell you without fear I am working at Arabic.  I hope you won’t think it silly.  It is very hard, and for ten days was as hard work as I ever had in my life.  I think I have learnt enough to see my way now, and this morning read the first chapter of Genesis in three-quarters of an hour.  It is rich, beyond all comparison, in inflexions; and the difficulty arises from the extreme multiplicity of all its forms:  e.g. each verb having not only active, middle, and passive voices, but the primitive active having not less than thirty-five derivative forms and the passive thirteen.  The “noun of action,”—­infinitive with article (to akonein) of the Greek—­is again different for each voice or form; and the primitive can take any of twenty-two forms, which are not compounded according to any rule.  Again, there are twenty-eight sets of irregular plurals, which are quite arbitrary.  No grammarian has ever given any explanation about them.  All mere matters of memory.  The very alphabet shows the richness of the language.  There are twenty-nine letters, besides vowel points; and each letter is written in four different ways, so that it is different when isolated, when in the beginning, middle, or end of a word.  It took me some hours to learn them.  In very many respects, it is closely allied to the Hebrew, so that everybody who writes Hebrew grammars and lexicons necessarily has much to do with Arabic; and a knowledge of it may be of great use in clearing up difficulties in the Bible.  My year in Oxford will enable me to go on with it, for in three weeks more I hope to be able to go on alone.  To-morrow I begin the Koran.  My lessons will not in all exceed 31; and I really should have gone on, perhaps, not much faster with Hebrew if I had worked it exclusively; and it is hard to read so many hours at one thing:  and I may say, now without doubt, that I have laid the foundation for a study of Oriental languages, if I have time and opportunity that may be fairly given to them.  Think what one hour a day is, and the pleasure to me is very great, and I feel that I have a knack rather (if I may say so) of laying hold of these things.  Don’t mention it to anyone.’