can go up to college 'a certain future first-class man'--then you can
give up classics if you like, and read other and more immediately
useful things--be President of the Union, and so on; but you cannot do
that from a god-like height unless you are 'a certain first.' So with
music, if you play at all, you must play like a whole band of seraphs
(as, indeed, you seem in a fair way to do). Of course, it is very easy
to say--Music is an art which, if cultivated merely because it will
'pay,' ceases to be either art or music. True! Quite true!! But only
true if you insert merely--merely because it will 'pay.' I think (I
may be wrong) that it is possible to cultivate it so as to 'pay,' and
yet love and reverence it (and yourself in it) as the highest form of
art.

"Now I come to riding. I do most earnestly suggest that if you can
bring yourself to learn to ride so as to be able to ride an ordinary
horse along a road with perfect safety, you should do so. I am clear
that you cannot go into the diplomatic service without it. In travel
you must ride. If you can bring yourself to it at all, it must be at
once.

"Now for my absence. Part of my plan is the writing of serious and
grave works, neither of which can be written until I have seen
Australia as well as America. I find it, then, a necessity to go
there; and I go there now, firstly because I have it within reach, and
secondly, because absence from all, and above all from you, dearest,
would be worse at any future time than now.

"Keep, however, constantly before you the ultimate doing good or being
useful--which is (for I firmly hold the Jesuit doctrine, if it be
rightly understood) to justify the means.