Subject: snowfall

From: "Nelly Boggs" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:01:03 -0700

But the essay is alive; thereis no reason to despair.
Something of the sort applies to MatthewArnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him asthough I had never seen him before.
Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some things, of course, arenot said.
It fills preciselythe space allotted to it.
They were seafarers, used to solitude and silence.
But the essay is alive; thereis no reason to despair.
Hismistress, his style, is a little somnolent sometimes in repose. It fills preciselythe space allotted to it. But it is ill work dragging such intimationsfrom their element. Some scrapethrough painfully; others fly with every wind favouring. He mustgive us a worn weekly halfpenny instead of a solid sovereign once ayear.
Very various talents havehelped or hindered the passage of the idea into words. It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feelnor hear.
The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more. We only know that the spirit ofpersonality permeates every word that he writes.
The drawing-room is the placewhere a great deal of reading is done nowadays, and the essays ofMr.
Something of the sort applies to MatthewArnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. What has become of our superlatively goodman? The ingot is so small, the manipulation so incessant.
Grün and his book should have beenembalmed for our perpetual delight in amber. The Elizabethans, to speakroughly, chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhousepublic. The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context.
Yet it is true that the essayist is the most sensitiveof all writers to public opinion.
We arenauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in theeternity of print.
But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayistsyet had something in common.
But there are other qualities which ourspecial weaknesses and tendencies demand in him.