_Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man.
In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author a mark of inward clarity.

A man who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulae that every one understands.

No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she believes only in words.

But if a young man really has ideas of his own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories unknown to the rest of the world.

Let us take an imaginary example.
Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in the minds of others.