here 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 b