they may do. To be agreeable, it is not necessary to be amusing; an
essay may be thoroughly delightful without a single witticism, while a
monotone of jokes soon grows tedious. Charge your style with life,
and the public will not ask for conundrums. But the profounder your
discourse, the greater must necessarily be the effort to refresh and
diversify. I have observed, in addressing audiences of children in
schools and elsewhere, that there is no fact so grave, no thought so
abstract, but you can make it very interesting to the small people, if
you will only put in plenty of detail and illustration; and I have not
observed that in this respect grown men are so very different. If,
therefore, in writing, you find it your mission to be abstruse, fight to
render your statement clear and attractive, as if your life depended on
it: your literary life does depend on it, and, if you fail, relapses
into a dead language, and becomes, like that of Coleridge, only a
_Biographia Literaria_. Labor, therefore, not in thought alone, but in
utterance; clothe and reclothe your grand conception twenty times, until
you find some phrase that with its grandeur shall be lucid also. It is
this unwearied literary patience that has enabled Emerson not merely to
introduce, but even to popularize, thoughts of such a quality as never
reached the popular mind 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