Hopkins’s delight in words is everywhere in his letters. He lived in the great age of philology and shared its fascination for what Matthew Prior called the “idiom of words.” In fact, he was taught by the same headmaster who had taught the etymologist Walter Skeat, who, with James Murray, launched the Oxford English Dictionary in 1879. “I am going to write to Skeat about scope,” Hopkins says in one letter. “I have doubts about Skeat’s treatment of scope, cope, scoop, scape, cap.”

Lês fierder by The Weekly Standard