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.

Of course