d before. And when such a writer, thus laborious
to do his utmost for his disciples, becomes after all incomprehensible,
we can try to believe that it is only that inevitable obscurity of vast
thought which Coleridge said was a compliment to the reader.

In learning to write availably, a newspaper-office is a capital
preparatory school. Nothing is so good to teach the use of materials,
and to compel to pungency of style. Being always at close quarters with
his readers, a journalist must shorten and sharpen his sentences, or he
is doomed. Yet this mental alertness is bought at a severe price; such
living from hand to mouth cheapens the whole mode of intellectual
existence, and it would seem that no successful journalist could ever
get the newspaper out of his blood, or achieve any high literary
success.

For purposes of illustration and elucidation, and even for amplitude of
vocabulary, wealth of accumulated materials is essential; and whether
this wealth be won by reading or by experience makes no great
difference. Coleridge attended Davy's chemical lectures to acquire new
metaphors, and it is of no consequence whether one comes to literature
from a library, a machine-shop, or a forecastle, provided he has learned
to work with thoroughness the soil he knows. After all is said and done,
however, books remain the chief quarries. Johnson declared, putting the
thing perhaps too mechanically, "The greater part of an author's time is
spent in reading in order to write; a man will turn over half a library
to make one book." Addison collected three folios of materials before
publishing the first number of the "Spectator." Remember, however, that
copious preparation has its perils also, in the crude display to which
it tempts. The object of high culture is not to exhibit culture, but
its results. You do not put guano on your garden that your garden may
blossom guano. Indeed, even for the proper subordination of one's own
thoughts the same self-control is needed; and there is no severer test
of literary training than in the power to prune out one's most cherished
sentence, when it grows obvious that the sacrifice will help the
symmetry or vigor of the whole.

Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare
no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be
struck out. Remember the Lacedemonian who was fined for saying that in
three words which might as well have been expressed in two. D