This letter opens with language as method of conventional commonplace communication. The second and third sentences are barely tinged by æsthetic emotion, as in “immense substructions” and “lovelier”; but it is not till the fourth sentence that style fairly begins. Then it rapidly falls away in the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences, to arise again with a new wave of æsthetic emotion, which progresses through the remainder of the quotation. The culminating points of the æsthetic emotion are precisely the culminating points of style, namely, in the phrases, “an emerald sky of leaves, starred with innumerable globes of their ripening fruit,” and in “sepulchres of the fame of those who once arrayed them with the beauty which has faded.” What constitutes the peculiar attractiveness of these expressions is this, that they are rich in æsthetic feeling, and communicate it to us. We are by the power of style sharers in high delights. In the first case we are awakened to a visualizing, to a sensuous beauty, though compounded with other elements, through metaphor; and in the second case the emotion is a complex of sensuous and spiritual elements. Take also the verses from Shelley already quoted. Mr. Spencer, in commenting on these lines, has correctly pitched upon the word “shepherded” as the culminating point; but when he intimates that the beauty and pleasing effect is due to the “distinctness with which it calls up the feature of the scene, bringing the mind by a bound to the desired conception,” we must dissent. This purely utilitarian explanation fails to recognise that poetic metaphor is confusing—here two classes of objects, clouds and sheep—and misleading, except to the poetic mind. A writer who was aiming purely at clearness and correctness of imaging, as a popular scientific writer, might mention the clouds as like patches of white wool; but he would not bring in the extraneous ideas of sheep and shepherd. If Mr. Spencer were trying to give us a vivid idea of clouds, he would surely not speak in this purely poetic fashion. It is a mode of fancy and emotion which the poet is indulging when he writes these lines, and not an intellectual impulse to clarify and illustrate. If Mr. Spencer receives them in this latter spirit, he misses their psychic content and explanation. Poetry is only intelligible to the poetic, and the German pedant who emended “Celia, drink to me only with thine eyes,” to “Celia, wink to me only with thine eyes,” was certainly economizing attention and rendering conception easy, but at the expense of poetic beauty. The source of the pleasure we take in poetic style—the highest and purest form of literary art—is evidently not for its intelligibility, at least primarily, but its æsthetic quality, an expression of a peculiar emotional attitude toward objects.