It was very pleasant to receive a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think I mastered anything beyond the date, which I knew, and the signature, at which I guessed.
There is a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours — it never grows old, and it never loses its novelty. One can say every morning, as one looks at it, ‘Here’s a letter of Morse’s I haven’t read yet. I think I shall take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t’s that look like w’s and those i’s that haven’t any eyebrows.’
Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever–unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
I remember at university, we had a lot of exams with heavy emphasis on essay-based answers where I'd frequently see my friends and peers ask for second and even third answer booklets. As a left-handed person with poor writing technique, writing continuously for a 3 hour exam caused me a fair amount of discomfort and pain, so i'd take a lot of breaks. So when my friends were leaving the exam 30 minutes early, having filled three booklets, I was staying to the very end - struggling to fill even one.
In nearly every example of this, I got (marginally) better grades than them.
> I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/