But, affectation or not, the musical enthusiasm vanished, and the encroaching, all-absorbing growth of the scientific preoccupation crowded it out. Indeed, any one who is susceptible to musical delight, appreciates how elusive it is, how much it depends upon favorable conditions and surroundings, and how peculiarly its delicate and subtle quality is subject to erasure by distractions of a different order. And Darwin’s comment on the disappearance of his pleasure in music is: ‘I have said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight.... I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure.’[343] With the enjoyment of beauty in literary forms, Darwin’s sense of loss was quite as keen as with music. Of the higher and finer elements of style and imagination there is little evidence that he was conscious. Such consciousness would not seem very compatible with his remark about Buckle: ‘To my taste he is the very best writer of the English language that ever lived, let the other be who he may.’[344] In this connection it is interesting to consider Darwin’s own style, as it appears in the vast mass of his production, running probably, letters and all, to over two million words. In this mass there are occasional passages of appealing beauty or startling effectiveness, for example, the charming sentence, written in age, ‘I should very much like to see you again, but you would find a visit here very dull, for we feel very old and have no amusement, and lead a solitary life,’[345] or the much earlier passage: ‘This letter is a most untidy one, but my mind is untidy with joy.’[346] But Darwin, in writing, would have bestowed no thought or care on such qualities as these. He had a great discovery to give to the world. His one desire was to give it accurately, lucidly, and in a form that would convince, and it was his despair that he thought nature had not endowed him with the gifts for doing this. He envies the admirable literary skill of Huxley and Spencer and deplores his own inability to get his thoughts and ideas into a shape that would force mankind to read and understand them: ‘I do not believe any man in England naturally writes so vile a style as I do.’[347]