and he read it as though it were a draper’s sale bill.  And yet it needs but a very little imagination for such a passage to become a series of vivid pictures.  Fire, hail, snow, vapour, hills, mountains, cedars, dragons and deeps—­every word is “a word of power” if only there is no hurry, if only each word as it comes is given time to call up the picture of the real thing before the inward eye.

And you may hear children of fourteen and fifteen who have passed examinations in “English” recite line after line of, say, Matthew Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman with a glib self-assured colourlessness due solely to the fact that no teacher has ever taught them respect for simple words.  And what simpler words could there be than these, for example—­

    “Where great whales come sailing by,
     Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
     Round the world, for ever and aye”?

 Simple, common words; yet if there is that leisurely attention to each
 one as it comes what an exhilarating picture arises of the great
 sea-beasts, and of “the round ocean and the living air.”

 I am not pleading for the stylist’s concentration on words which
 exalts them above the things they body forth.  The most vivid and
 beautiful description of dawn in the English language—­

    “Night’s candles are burned out, and jocund morn
     Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops”

though spoken by the most sensitively vibrant voice in the world, can never come near the real dawn breaking across real mountains.  But the point is that those two lines composed of simple English words have power, if we pay them respect, to create the dawn within the mind, and to supply the spirit with that beauty which is its very breath.

If this patience with words, this respect for the familiar fine things of our native tongue, this desire to make them yield up their strength and beauty, if this has nothing to do with healthy living I don’t know what has.  William Wordsworth’s—­

    “And vital feelings of delight
     Shall rear her form to stately height”

is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth.  You do not need to be a “Christian Scientist” to know that ideas and emotions can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth.  Other people besides “Eugenists” have observed that ugly or mean-spirited parents seldom have beautiful children.

But though the power of ideas is a commonplace, and though psychologists tell us how much we may improve mental concentration by letting the words of any sentence call up each its own picture, what they a omit to do is to recognise the need of the human spirit for beauty.  You can concentrate your thought on the list of pickles in a grocer’s price list:  it is doubtless a good exercise.  But the same exercise directed to some great phrase,