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“The reason why Professor Earle was pleased with this Prose Diction, and why Mr. W. B. Yeats believes that 'in this century he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves nothing,' is that men understand now the im- possibility of speaking aloud all that is within them, and if they do not speak it, they cannot write as they speak. The most they can do is to write as they would speak in a less solitary world. A man cannot say all that is in his heart to a woman or another man. The waters are too deep between us. We have not the confidence in what is within us, nor in our voices. Any man talking to the deaf or in dark- ness will leave unsaid things which he could say were he not compelled to shout, or were it light; or perhaps he will venture once — even twice— and a silence or a foolish noise prohibits him. But the silence of solitude is kindly; it allows a man to speak as if there were another in the world like himself; and in very truth, out of the multitudes, in the course of years, one or two may come, or many, who can enter that solitude and converse with him, inspired by him to confidence and articulation. Wisely did Quintilian argue against dictation, that ‘privacy is rendered impossible by it; and that a spot free from witnesses and the deepest possible silence are the most desirable for persons engaged writing, no one can doubt. You are not therefore necessarily to listen to those who think that groves and woods are the most proper places for study. ... To me, assuredly, such retirement seems rather conducive to pleasure than an incentive to literary exertion. Demosthenes acted more wisely, who secluded himself in a place where no voice could be heard, and no prospect contemplated, that his eyes might not oblige his mind to attend to anything else besides his business. As to those who study by lamplight, therefore, let the silence of the night, the closed chamber, and a single light, keep them, as it were, wholly in seclusion. . . .”

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Book:Walter Pater
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“I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more… The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone. The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.”

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Author:Edward Thomas
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