assured colourlessness
due solely to the fact that no teacher has ever taught them respect
for simple words. And what simpler words could there be than these,
for example--

"Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world, for ever and aye"?

Simple, common words; yet if there is that leisurely attention to each
one as it comes what an exhilarating picture arises of the great
sea-beasts, and of "the round ocean and the living air."

I am not pleading for the stylist's concentration on words which
exalts them above the things they body forth. The most vivid and
beautiful description of dawn in the English language--

"Night's candles are burned out, and jocund morn
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops"

though spoken by the most sensitively vibrant voice in the world, can
never come near the real dawn breaking across real mountains. But the
point is that those two lines composed of simple English words have
power, if we pay them respect, to create the dawn within the mind, and
to supply the spirit with that beauty which is its very breath.

If this patience with words, this respect for the familiar fine things
of our native tongue, this desire to make them yield up their strength
and beauty, if this has nothing to do with healthy living I don't know
what has. William Wordsworth's--

"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height"

is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth. You do
not need to be a "Christian Scientist" to know that ideas and emotions
can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth. Other
people besides "Eugenists" have observed that ugly or mean-spirited
parents seldom have beautiful children.

But though the power of ideas is a commonplace, and though
psychologists tell us how much we may improve mental concentration by
letting the words of any sentence call up each its own picture, what
they a omit to do is to recognise the need of the human spirit for
beauty. You can concentrate your thought on the list of pickles in a
grocer's price list: it is doubtless a good exercise. But the same
exercise directed to some great phrase, such as Emerson's _Trust
thyself: ever' heart vibrates to that iron string_; or some vivid
lyrical image such as _All the trees of the field shall clap their
hands_, or even a complete poem of simple words but permanent beauty,
such as that one of W