or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire.
He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too
brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer
to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence
which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise
with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building
spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and
forward, as it lives along the animated line of its labour,
springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to
circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living
thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his
perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his
imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate
of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a
railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to
that of a railway."[6]

Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if he
is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a
corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say, with Bishop
Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: "It must be acknowledged that
some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult; or, if
you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone are
judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges
whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how
far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have been
put in a plainer manner."[7]