I have, since I wrote my last letter, led a perfectly monotonous life. Read all the morning, go out for a walk and a lounge in a concert garden in the afternoon, and read after tea. I am quite well satisfied with my progress in the noble German tongue, which has been steady, although, since the first day I wrote to you about [it], not brilliant. Its difficulties are I think quite unjustifiably great for a modern language--it is in fact without _any_ of the modern improvements. I read the little newspapers, which Dr. Semler takes, carefully from beginning to end; and what with the other newspapers I see at a reading-room, the talk I hear, and a little other reading, I have a quite vague and confused but very wonderful impression of the strange difference between the whole German way of thinking and ours; and in my as yet crude fancy it seems to be connected with the grammatical structure of the sentences and the endless power of making new words by combination. I have just been reading Hegel's chapter on epic poetry in his "Aesthetik," and [the] truly monstrous sentences therein were quite a revelation to me. It seems to me that the expression corresponds much more closely to the spontaneous and impromptu mode of thought than in our Latinized tongues--that the language allows and invites speculation and expatiation without limit. As soon as the first glimmering of an idea has dawned upon you, there is no reason why you should not begin to inscribe, for you can wallow round and round as you proceed, affixing limitations, lugging in definitions and explanations as fast as they suggest each other, and need never go back to reshape your beginning. While with us you will, as a rule, come to grief if you begin your sentence without a pretty distinct idea of what the whole is going to be. Then the endless power of word-multiplication by composition, and of making adjectives of whole phrases must allow you to _fix_, and to fix in a most homely, pregnant form, a host of evanescent shades of meaning (most of which would with us be lost), as fast as they flash upon the mind. And from these successive approximations the final form of the thought may be more easily and surely distilled than if it had to be all formed in one's head before it could get even an approximate expression.