I urged the marvellous power of suggestion that European words had in the hands of the poets. They bore so many sub-meanings and branches of meaning that the full depths of a poem or great prose work were never sounded. Age after age of students could go on studying it and still find in it new significance, new inspiration. Commentary after commentary had been written on the _Iliad_, the _Divine Comedy_, and Shakespeare’s plays, without exhausting all the meaning they had in them. Vast libraries of interpretation of them had accumulated, and yet every new age found opportunity for additions to them. This was due to the subtle under-meanings that touched innumerable keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety of emotions. An able writer could bring words together so aptly as to affect different minds in different ways. A nebulous significance gathered round his phrases and sentences, and out of this a hundred scholars would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay the thoughts in the depths of his words, ready for the profounder students to fathom. And so every great poem inspired age after age in a thousand different directions. Would this have been the case, if every word had been made to serve but one purpose, if every phrase had been unequivocal in meaning, and every sentence unshaded and perspicuous? It was the play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in language that rendered European poetry so beautiful and undyingly suggestive. It was the twilight of words that gave such majestic and shadowy forms to the ideas and characters and scenes of the great poems of the past. And what would the generations of scholars and teachers have done without these hidden meanings to reveal in their literature, without these intricacies to disentangle, without these dim allusions and adumbrations of sense to make clear? Where would our youth have found their intellectual training, if all our great literature had been transparent and precise in meaning?