On the Study of Words

by Richard Chenevix Trench

LECTURE II.

ON THE POETRY IN WORDS.

I said in my last lecture, or rather I quoted another who had said, that language is fossil poetry. It is true that for us very often this poetry which is bound up in words has in great part or altogether disappeared. We fail to recognize it, partly from long familiarity with it, partly from insufficient knowledge, partly, it may be, from never having had our attention called to it. None have pointed it out to us; we may not ourselves have possessed the means of detecting it; and thus it has come to pass that we have been in close vicinity to this wealth, which yet has not been ours. Margaret has not been for us 'the Pearl,' nor Esther 'the Star,' nor Susanna 'the Lily,' [Footnote: See Jacob Grimm, Ueber Frauennamen aus Blumen, in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. ii. pp. 366-401; and on the subject of this paragraph more generally, Schleicher, Die Deutsche Sprache, p. 115 sqq.] nor Stephen 'the Crown,' nor Albert 'the illustrious in birth.' 'In our ordinary language,' as Montaigne has said, 'there are several excellent phrases and metaphors to be met with, of which the beauty is withered by age, and the colour is sullied by too common handling; but that takes nothing from the relish to an understanding man, neither does it derogate from the glory of those ancient authors, who, 'tis likely, first brought those words into that lustre.' We read in one of Molière's most famous comedies of one who was surprised to discover that he had been talking prose all his life without being aware of it. If we knew all, we might be much more surprised to find that we had been talking poetry, without ever having so much as suspected this. For indeed poetry and passion seek to insinuate, and do insinuate themselves everywhere in language; they preside continually at the giving of names; they enshrine and incarnate themselves in these: for 'poetry is the mother tongue of the human race,' as a great German writer has said. My present lecture shall contain a few examples and illustrations, by which I would make the truth of this appear.

'Iliads without a Homer,' some one has called, with a little exaggeration, the beautiful but anonymous ballad poetry of Spain. One may be permitted, perhaps, to push the exaggeration a little further in the same direction, and to apply the same language not merely to a ballad but to a word. For poetry, which is passion and imagination embodying themselves in words, does not necessarily demand a combination of words for this. Of this passion and imagination a single word may be the vehicle. As the sun can image itself alike in a tiny dew-drop or in the mighty ocean, and can do it, though on a different scale, as perfectly in the one as in the other, so the spirit of poetry can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an Iliad. Nothing in language is too small, as nothing is too great, for it to fill with its presence. Everywhere it can find, or, not finding, can make, a shrine for itself, which afterwards it can render translucent and transparent with its own indwelling glory. On every side we are beset with poetry. Popular language is full of it, of words used in an imaginative sense, of things called—and not merely in transient moments of high passion, and in the transfer which at such moments finds place of the image to the thing imaged, but permanently,—by names having immediate reference not to what they are, but to what they are like. All language is in some sort, as one has said, a collection of faded metaphors. [Footnote: Jean Paul: Ist jede Sprache in Rücksicht geistiger Beziehungen ein Wörterbuch erblasster Metaphern. We regret this, while yet it is not wholly matter of regret. Gerber (Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 387) urges that language would be quite unmanageable, that the words which we use would be continually clashing with and contradicting one another, if every one of them retained a lively impress of the image on which it originally rested, and recalled this to our mind. His words, somewhat too strongly put, are these: Für den Usus der Sprache, für ihren Verstand und ihre Verständlichkeit ist allerdings das Erblassen ihrer Lautbilder, so dass sie allmählig als blosse Zeichen für Begriffe fungiren, nothwendig. Die Ueberzahl der Bilder würde, wenn sie alle als solche wirkten, nur verwirren und jede klarere Auffassung, wie sie die praktischen Zwecke der Gegenwart fordern, unmöglich machen. Die Bilder würden ausserdem einander zum Theil zerstören, indem sie die Farben verschiedener Sphären zusammenfliessenlassen, und damit für den Verstand nur Unsinn bedeuten.]

Sometimes, indeed, they have not faded at all. Thus at Naples it is the ordinary language to call the lesser storm-waves 'pecore,' or sheep; the larger 'cavalloni,' or big horses. Who that has watched the foaming crests, the white manes, as it were, of the larger billows as they advance in measured order, and rank on rank, into the bay, but will own not merely the fitness, but the grandeur, of this last image? Let me illustrate my meaning more at length by the word 'tribulation.' We all know in a general way that this word, which occurs not seldom in Scripture and in the Liturgy, means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question 'tribulation' a little closer. It is derived from the Latin 'tribulum,' which was the threshing instrument or harrow, whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and 'tribulatio' in its primary signification was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian Church appropriated the word and image for the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, [Footnote: Triticum itself may be connected with tero, tritus; [so Curtius, Greek Etym. No. 239].] he therefore called these sorrows and trials 'tribulations,' threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner. Now in proof of my assertion that a single word is often a concentrated poem, a little grain of pure gold capable of being beaten out into a broad extent of gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very word 'tribulation,' a graceful composition by George Wither, a prolific versifier, and occasionally a poet, of the seventeenth century. You will at once perceive that it is all wrapped up in this word, being from first to last only the explicit unfolding of the image and thought which this word has implicitly given; it is as follows:—

'Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat,
Until the chaff be purgèd from the wheat,
Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear,
The richness of the flour will scarce appear.
So, till men's persons great afflictions touch,
If worth be found, their worth is not so much,
Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet
That value which in threshing they may get.
For till the bruising flails of God's corrections
Have threshèd out of us our vain affections;
Till those corruptions which do misbecome us
Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us;
Until from us the straw of worldly treasures,
Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures,
Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay,
To thresh the husk of this our flesh away;
And leave the soul uncovered; nay, yet more,
Till God shall make our very spirit poor,
We shall not up to highest wealth aspire;
But then we shall; and that is my desire.'

This deeper religious use of the word 'tribulation' was unknown to classical antiquity, belonging exclusively to the Christian writers; and the fact that the same deepening and elevating of the use of words recurs in a multitude of other, and many of them far more signal, instances, is one well deserving to be followed up. Nothing, I am persuaded, would more mightily convince us of the new power which Christianity proved in the world than to compare the meaning which so many words possessed before its rise, and the deeper meaning which they obtained, so soon as they were assumed as the vehicles of its life, the new thought and feeling enlarging, purifying, and ennobling the very words which they employed. This is a subject which I shall have occasion to touch on more than once in these lectures, but is itself well worthy of, as it would afford ample material for, a volume.

On the suggestion of this word 'tribulation', I will quote two or three words from Coleridge, bearing on the matter in hand. He has said, 'In order to get the full sense of a word, we should first present to our minds the visual image that forms its primary meaning.' What admirable counsel is here! If we would but accustom ourselves to the doing of this, what a vast increase of precision and force would all the language which we speak, and which others speak to us, obtain; how often would that which is now obscure at once become clear; how distinct the limits and boundaries of that which is often now confused and confounded! It is difficult to measure the amount of food for the imagination, as well as gains for the intellect, which the observing of this single rule would afford us. Let me illustrate this by one or two examples. We say of such a man that he is 'desultory.' Do we attach any very distinct meaning to the word? Perhaps not. But get at the image on which 'desultory' rests; take the word to pieces; learn that it is from 'desultor,' [Footnote: Lat. desultor is from desult-, the stem of desultus, past part, of desilire, to leap down.] one who rides two or three horses at once, leaps from one to the other, being never on the back of any one of them long; take, I say, the word thus to pieces, and put it together again, and what a firm and vigorous grasp will you have now of its meaning! A 'desultory' man is one who jumps from one study to another, and never continues for any length of time in one. Again, you speak of a person as 'capricious,' or as full of 'caprices.' But what exactly are caprices? 'Caprice' is from capra, a goat. [Footnote: The etymology of caprice has not been discovered yet; the derivation from capra is unsatisfactory, as it does not account for the latter part of the word.] If ever you have watched a goat, you will have observed how sudden, how unexpected, how unaccountable, are the leaps and springs, now forward, now sideward, now upward, in which it indulges. A 'caprice' then is a movement of the mind as unaccountable, as little to be calculated on beforehand, as the springs and bounds of a goat. Is not the word so understood a far more picturesque one than it was before? and is there not some real gain in the vigour and vividness of impression which is in this way obtained? 'Pavaner' is the French equivalent for our verb 'to strut,' 'fourmiller' for our verb 'to swarm.' But is it not a real gain to know further that the one is to strut as the peacock does, the other to swarm as do ants? There are at the same time, as must be freely owned, investigations, moral no less than material, in which the nearer the words employed approach to an algebraic notation, and the less disturbed or coloured they are by any reminiscences of the ultimate grounds on which they rest, the better they are likely to fulfil the duties assigned to them; but these are exceptions. [Footnote: A French writer, Adanson, in his Natural History of Senegal complains of the misleading character which names so often have, and urges that the only safety is to give to things names which have and can have no meaning at all. His words are worth quoting as a curiosity, if nothing else: L'expérience nous apprend, que la plupart des noms significatifs qu'on a voulu donner à différens objets d'histoire naturelle, sont devenus faux à mesure qu'on a découvert des qualités, des propriétés nouvelles ou contraires à celles qui avaient fait donner ces noms: il faut donc, pour se mettre à l'abri des contradictions, éviter les termes figurés, et même faire en sorte qu'on ne puisse les rapporter à quelque étymologie, a fin que ceux, qui ont la fureur des étymologies, ne soient pas tenus de leur attribuer une idée fausse. II en doit être des noms, comme des coups des jeux de hazard, qui n'ont pour l'ordinaire aucune liaison entre eux: ils seraient d'autant meilleurs qu'ils seraient moins significatifs, moins relatifs à d'autres noms, ou à des choses connues, par ce que l'idée ne se fixant qu'à un seul objet, le saisit beaucoup plus nettement, que lorsqu'elle se lie avec d'autres objets qui y ont du rapport. There is truth in what he says, but the remedy he proposes is worse than the disease.]

The poetry which has been embodied in the names of places, in those names which designate the leading features of outward nature, promontories, mountains, capes, and the like, is very worthy of being elicited and evoked anew, latent as it now has oftentimes become. Nowhere do we so easily forget that names had once a peculiar fitness, which was the occasion of their giving. Colour has often suggested the name, as in the well-known instance of our own 'Albion,'—'the silver- coasted isle,' as Tennyson so beautifully has called it,—which had this name from the white line of cliffs presented by it to those approaching it by the narrow seas. [Footnote: The derivation of the name Albion has not been discovered yet; it is even uncertain whether the word is Indo-European; see Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 200.] 'Himalaya' is 'the abode of snow.' Often, too, shape and configuiation are incorporated in the name, as in 'Trinacria' or 'the three- promontoried land,' which was the Greek name of Sicily; in 'Drepanum' or 'the sickle,' the name which a town on the north-west promontory of the island bore, from the sickle-shaped tongue of land on which it was built. But more striking, as the embodiment of a poetical feeling, is the modern name of the great southern peninsula of Greece. We are all aware that it is called the 'Morea'; but we may not be so well aware from whence that name is derived. It had long been the fashion among ancient geographers to compare the shape of this region to a platane leaf; [Footnote: Strabo, viii. 2; Pliny, H.N. iv. 5; Agathemerus, I.i. p. 15; echein de omoion schaema phullps platanan] and a glance at the map will show that the general outline of that leaf, with its sharply- incised edges, justified the comparison. This, however, had remained merely as a comparison; but at the shifting and changing of names, that went with the breaking up of the old Greek and Roman civilization, the resemblance of this region to a leaf, not now any longer a platane, but a mulberry leaf, appeared so strong, that it exchanged its classic name of Peloponnesus for 'Morea' which embodied men's sense of this resemblance, morus being a mulberry tree in Latin, and morea in Greek. This etymology of 'Morea' has been called in question; [Footnote: By Fallmerayer, Gesck. der Halbinsel Morea, p. 240, sqq. The island of Ceylon, known to the Greeks as Taprobane, and to Milton as well (P. L. iv. 75), owed this name to a resemblance which in outline it bore to the leaf of the betel tree. [This is very doubtful.] but, as it seems to me, on no sufficient grounds. Deducing, as one objector does, 'Morea' from a Slavonic word 'more,' the sea, he finds in this derivation a support for his favourite notion that the modern population of Greece is not descended from the ancient, but consists in far the larger proportion of intrusive Slavonic races. Two mountains near Dublin, which we, keeping in the grocery line, have called the Great and the Little Sugarloaf, are named in Irish 'the Golden Spears.'

In other ways also the names of places will oftentimes embody some poetical aspect under which now or at some former period men learned to regard them. Oftentimes when discoverers come upon a new land they will seize with a firm grasp of the imagination the most striking feature which it presents to their eyes, and permanently embody this in a word. Thus the island of Madeira is now, I believe, nearly bare of wood; but its sides were covered with forests at the time when it was first discovered, and hence the name, 'madeira' in Portuguese having this meaning of wood. [Footnote: [Port. madeira, 'wood,' is the same word as the Lat. materia.] Some have said that the first Spanish discoverers of Florida gave it this name from the rich carpeting of flowers which, at the time when first their eyes beheld it, everywhere covered the soil. [Footnote: The Spanish historian Herrera says that Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida, gave that name to the country for two reasons: first, because it was a land of flowers, secondly, because it was discovered by him on March 27, 1513, Easter Day, which festival was called by the Spaniards, 'Pascua Florida,' or 'Pascua de Flores,' see Herrera's History, tr. by Stevens, ii. p. 33, and the Discovery of Florida by R. Hakluyt, ed. by W. B. Rye for the Hakluyt Soc., 1851, introd. p. x.; cp. Larousse (s.v.), and Pierer's Conversations Lexicon. It is stated by some authorities that Florida was so called because it was discovered on Palm Sunday; this is due to a mistaken inference from the names for that Sunday—Pascha Florum, Pascha Floridum (Ducange), Pasque Fleurie (Cotgrave); see Dict. Géog. Univ., 1884, and Brockhaus.] Surely Florida, as the name passes under our eye, or from our lips, is something more than it was before, when we may thus think of it as the land of flowers. [Footnote: An Italian poet, Fazio degli Uberti, tells us that Florence has its appellation from the same cause:

Poichè era posta in un prato di fiori,
Le denno il nome bello, oude s' ingloria.

It would be instructive to draw together a collection of etymologies which have been woven into verse. These are so little felt to be alien to the spirit of poetry, that they exist in large numbers, and often lend to the poem in which they find a place a charm and interest of their own. In five lines of Paradise Lost Milton introduces four such etymologies, namely, those of the four fabled rivers of hell, though this will sometimes escape the notice of the English reader:

'Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate,
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep,
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon,
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.'

'Virgil, that great master of the proprieties,' as Bishop Pearson has so happily called him, does not shun, but rather loves to introduce them, as witness his etymology of 'Byrsa,' Aen. i. 367, 368; v. 59, 63 [but the etymology here is imaginative, the name Byrsa being of Punic, that is of Semitic, origin, and meaning 'a fortress'; compare Heb. Bozrah]; of 'Silvius,' Aen. vi. 763, 765; of 'Argiletum,' where he is certainly wrong (Aen. viii. 345); of 'Latium,' with reference to Saturn having remained latent there (Aen. viii. 322; of. Ovid, Fasti, i. 238); of 'Laurens' (Aen. vii. 63):

Latiumque vocari
Maluit, his quoniam latuisset tutus in oris:

and again of 'Avernus' (=[Greek: aornos], Aen. vi. 243); being indeed in this anticipated by Lucretius (vi. 741):

quia sunt avibus contraria cunctis.

Ovid's taste is far from faultless, and his example cannot go for much; but he is always a graceful versifier, and his Fasti swarms with etymologies, correct and incorrect; as of 'Agonalis' (i. 322), of 'Aprilis' (iv. 89), of 'Augustus' (i. 609-614), of 'Februarius' (ii. 19-22), of 'hostia' (i. 336), of 'Janus' (i. 120-127), of 'Junius' (vi. 26), of 'Lemures' (v. 479-484), of 'Lucina' (ii. 449), of 'majestas' (v. 26), of 'Orion' (v. 535), of 'pecunia' (v. 280, 281), of 'senatus' (v. 64), of 'Sulmo'(iv. 79; cf. Silius Italicus, ix. 70); of 'Vesta' (vi. 299), of 'victima' (i. 335); of 'Trinacris' (iv. 420). He has them also elsewhere, as of 'Tomi' (Trist. iii. 9, 33). Lucilius, in like manner, gives us the etymology of 'iners': Ut perhibetur iners, ars in quo non erit ulla; Propertius (iv. 2, 3) of 'Vertumnus'; and Lucretius of 'Magnes' (vi. 909).]

The name of Port Natal also embodies a fact which must be of interest to its inhabitants, namely, that this port was discovered on Christmas Day, the dies natalis of our Lord.

Then again what poetry is there, as indeed there ought to be, in the names of flowers! I do not speak of those, the exquisite grace and beauty of whose names is so forced on us that we cannot miss it, such as 'Aaron's rod,' 'angel's eyes,' 'bloody warrior,' 'blue-bell, 'crown imperial,' 'cuckoo-flower,' blossoming as this orchis does when the cuckoo is first heard, [Footnote: In a catalogue of English Plant Names I count thirty in which 'cuckoo' formed a component part.] 'eye- bright,' 'forget-me-not,' 'gilt-cup' (a local name for the butter-cup, drawn from the golden gloss of its petals), 'hearts-ease,' 'herb-of- grace,' 'Jacob's ladder,' 'king-cup,' 'lady's fingers,' 'Lady's smock,' 'Lady's tresses,' 'larkspur,' 'Lent lily,' 'loose-strife,' 'love-in- idleness,' 'Love lies bleeding,' 'maiden-blush,' 'maiden-hair,' 'meadow-sweet,' 'Our Lady's mantle,' 'Our Lady's slipper,' 'queen-of- the-meadows,' 'reine-marguerite,' 'rosemary,' 'snow-flake,' 'Solomon's seal,' 'star of Bethlehem,' 'sun-dew,' 'sweet Alison,' 'sweet Cicely,' 'sweet William,' 'Traveller's joy,' 'Venus' looking-glass,' 'Virgin's bower,' and the like; but take 'daisy'; surely this charming little English flower, which has stirred the peculiar affection of English poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth, and received the tribute of their song, [Footnote: 'Fair fall that gentle flower, A golden tuft set in a silver crown,' as Brown exclaims, whose singularly graceful Pastorals should not be suffered to fall altogether to oblivion. In Ward's recent English Poets, vol. ii. p. 65, justice has been done to them, and to their rare beauty.] becomes more charming yet, when we know, as Chaucer long ago has told us, that 'daisy' is day's eye, or in its early spelling 'daieseighe,' the eye of day; these are his words:

'That men by reson well it calle may
The daisie, or elles the ye of day.'
Chaucer, ed. Morris, vol. v. p. 281.

For only consider how much is implied here. To the sun in the heavens this name, eye of day, was naturally first given, and those who transferred the title to our little field flower meant no doubt to liken its inner yellow disk, or shield, to the great golden orb of the sun, and the white florets which encircle this disk to the rays which the sun spreads on all sides around him. What imagination was here, to suggest a comparison such as this, binding together as this does the smallest and the greatest! what a travelling of the poet's eye, with the power which is the privilege of that eye, from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, and of linking both together. So too, call up before your mind's eye the 'lavish gold' of the drooping laburnum when in flower, and you will recognize the poetry of the title, 'the golden rain,' which in German it bears. 'Celandine' does not so clearly tell its own tale; and it is only when you have followed up the [Greek: chelidonion], (swallow-wort), of which 'celandin' is the English representative, that the word will yield up the poetry which is concealed in it.

And then again, what poetry is there often in the names of birds and beasts and fishes, and indeed of all the animated world around us; how marvellously are these names adapted often to bring out the most striking and characteristic features of the objects to which they are given. Thus when the Romans became acquainted with the stately giraffe, long concealed from them in the interior deserts of Africa, (which we learn from Pliny they first did in the shows exhibited by Julius Caesar,) it was happily imagined to designate a creature combining, though with infinitely more grace, something of the height and even the proportions of the camel with the spotted skin of the pard, by a name which should incorporate both these its most prominent features, [Footnote: Varro: Quod erat figura ut camelus, maculis ut panthera; and Horace (Ep. ii. I, 196): Diversum confusa genus panthera camelo.] calling it the 'camelopard.' Nor can we, I think, hesitate to accept that account as the true one, which describes the word as no artificial creation of scientific naturalists, but as bursting extempore from the lips of the common people, who after all are the truest namers, at the first moment when the novel creature was presented to their gaze. 'Cerf-volant,' a name which the French have so happily given to the horned scarabeus, the same which we somewhat less poetically call the 'stag-beetle,' is another example of what may be effected with the old materials, by merely bringing them into new and happy combinations.

You know the appearance of the lizard, and the star-like shape of the spots which are sown over its back. Well, in Latin it is called 'stellio,' from stella, a star; just as the basilisk had in Greek this name of 'little king' because of the shape as of a kingly crown which the spots on its head might be made by the fancy to assume. Follow up the etymology of 'squirrel,' and you will find that the graceful creature which bears this name has obtained it as being wont to sit under the shadow of its own tail. [Footnote: [The word squirrel is a diminutive of the Greek word for squirrel, [Greek: skiouros], literally 'shadow-tail.'] Need I remind you of our 'goldfinch,' evidently so called from that bright patch of yellow on its wing; our 'kingfisher,' having its name from the royal beauty, the kingly splendour of the plumage with which it is adorned? Some might ask why the stormy petrel, a bird which just skims and floats on the topmost wave, should bear this name? No doubt we have here the French 'pétrel,' or little Peter, and the bird has in its name an allusion to the Apostle Peter, who at his Master's bidding walked for a while on the unquiet surface of an agitated sea. The 'lady-bird' or 'lady-cow' is prettily named, as indeed the whole legend about it is full of grace and fancy [Footnote: [For other names for the 'lady-bird,' and the reference in many of them to God and the Virgin Mary, see Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 694.]; but a common name which in many of our country parts this creature bears, the 'golden knob,' is prettier still. And indeed in our country dialects there is a wide poetical nomenclature which is well worthy of recognition; thus the shooting lights of the Aurora Borealis are in Lancashire 'the Merry Dancers'; clouds piled up in a particular fashion are in many parts of England styled 'Noah's Ark'; the puff-ball is 'the Devil's snuff-box'; the dragon-fly 'the Devil's darning-needle'; a large black beetle 'the Devil's coach-horse.' Any one who has watched the kestrel hanging poised in the air, before it swoops upon its prey, will acknowledge the felicity of the name 'windhover,' or sometimes 'windfanner,' which it popularly bears. [Footnote: In Wallace's Tropical Nature there is a beautiful chapter on humming birds, and the names which in various languages these exquisite little creatures bear.] The amount is very large of curious legendary lore which is everywhere bound up in words, and which they, if duly solicited, will give back to us again. For example, the Greek 'halcyon,' which we have adopted without change, has reference, and wraps up in itself an allusion, to one of the most beautiful and significant legends of heathen antiquity; according to which the sea preserved a perfect calmness for all the period, the fourteen 'halcyon days,' during which this bird was brooding over her nest. The poetry of the name survives, whether the name suggested the legend, or the legend the name. Take again the names of some of our precious stones, as of the topaz, so called, as some said, because men were only able to conjecture ([Greek: topazein]) the position of the cloud-concealed island from which it was brought. [Footnote: Pliny, H. N. xxxvii. 32. [But this is only popular etymology: the word can hardly be of Greek origin; see A. S. Palmer, Folk-Etymology, p. 589.]

Very curious is the determination which some words, indeed many, seem to manifest, that their poetry shall not die; or, if it dies in one form, that it shall revive in another. Thus if there is danger that, transferred from one language to another, they shall no longer speak to the imagination of men as they did of old, they will make to themselves a new life, they will acquire a new soul in the room of that which has ceased to quicken and inform them any more. Let me make clear what I mean by two or three examples. The Germans, knowing nothing of carbuncles, had naturally no word of their own for them; and when they first found it necessary to name them, as naturally borrowed the Latin 'carbunculus,' which originally had meant 'a little live coal,' to designate these precious stones of a fiery red. But 'carbunculus,' word full of poetry and life for Latin-speaking men, would have been only an arbitrary sign for as many as were ignorant of that language. What then did these, or what, rather, did the working genius of the language, do? It adopted, but, in adopting, modified slightly yet effectually the word, changing it into 'Karfunkel,' thus retaining the framework of the original, yet at the same time, inasmuch as 'funkeln' signifies 'to sparkle,' reproducing now in an entirely novel manner the image of the bright sparkling of the stone, for every knower of the German tongue. 'Margarita,' or pearl, belongs to the earliest group of Latin words adopted into English. The word, however, told nothing about itself to those who adopted it. But the pearl might be poetically contemplated as the sea-stone; and so our fathers presently transformed 'margarita' into 'mere-grot,' which means nothing less. [Footnote: Such is the A.S. form of margarita in three versions of the parable of the Pearl of Great Price, St. Matt. xiii. 45; see Anglo-Saxon Gospels, ed. Skeat, 1887.] Take another illustration of this from another quarter. The French 'rossignol,' a nightingale, is undoubtedly the Latin 'lusciniola,' the diminutive of 'luscinia,' with the alteration, so frequent in the Romance languages, of the commencing 'l' into 'r.' Whatever may be the etymology of 'luscinia,' it is plain that for Frenchmen in general the word would no longer suggest any meaning at all, hardly even for French scholars, after the serious transformations which it had undergone; while yet, at the same time, in the exquisitely musical 'rossignol,' and still more perhaps in the Italian 'usignuolo,' there is an evident intention and endeavour to express something of the music of the bird's song in the liquid melody of the imitative name which it bears; and thus to put a new soul into the word, in lieu of that other which had escaped. Or again—whatever may be the meaning of Senlac, the name of that field where the ever-memorable battle, now better known as the Battle of Hastings, was fought, it certainly was not 'Sanglac,' or Lake of Blood; the word only shaping itself into this significant form subsequently to the battle, and in consequence of it.

One or two examples more of the perishing of the old life in a word, and the birth of a new in its stead, may be added. The old name of Athens, 'Athaevai,' was closely linked with the fact that the goddess Pallas Athêne was the guardian deity of the city. The reason of the name, with other facts of the old mythology, faded away from the memory of the peasantry of modern Greece; but Athens is a name which must still mean something for them. Accordingly it is not 'Athaevai now, but 'Avthaevai, or the Blooming, on the lips of the peasantry round about; so Mr. Sayce assures us. The same process everywhere meets us. Thus no one who has visited Lucerne can fail to remember the rugged mountain called 'Pilatus' or 'Mont Pilate,' which stands opposite to him; while if he has been among the few who have cared to climb it, he will have been shown by his guide the lake at its summit in which Pontius Pilate in his despair drowned himself, with an assurance that from this suicide of his the mountain obtained its name. Nothing of the kind. 'Mont Pilate' stands for 'Mons Pileatus,' the 'capped hill'; the clouds, as one so often sees, gathering round its summit, and forming the shape or appearance of a cap or hat. When this true derivation was forgotten or misunderstood, the other explanation was invented and imposed. [Footnote: [The old name of Pilatus was Fractus Mons, 'broken mountain' from its rugged cliffs and precipices. Pilatus did not become general till the close of the last century.] An instructive example this, let me observe by the way, of that which has happened continually in the case of far older legends; I mean that the name has suggested the legend, and not the legend the name. We have an apt illustration of this in the old notion that the crocodile ([Greek: krokodeilos]) could not endure saffron.

I have said that poetry and imagination seek to penetrate everywhere; and this is literally true; for even the hardest, austerest studies cannot escape their influence; they will put something of their own life into the dry bones of a nomenclature which seems the remotest from them, the most opposed to them. Thus in Danish the male and female lines of descent and inheritance are called respectively the sword-side and the spindle-side. [Footnote: [In the same way the Germans used to employ schwert and kunkel; compare the use of the phrases on ða sperehealfe, and on ða spinlhealfe in King Alfred's will; see Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus, No. 314 (ii. 116), Pauli's Life of Alfred, p. 225, Lappenberg's Anglo-Saxon Kings, ii. 99 (1881).] He who in prosody called a metrical foot consisting of one long syllable followed by two short (-..) a 'dactyle' or a finger, with allusion to the long first joint of the finger, and the two shorter which follow, whoever he may have been, and some one was the first to do it, must be allowed to have brought a certain amount of imagination into a study so alien to it as prosody very well might appear.

He did the same in another not very poetical region who invented the Latin law-term, 'stellionatus.' The word includes all such legally punishable acts of swindling or injurious fraud committed on the property of another as are not specified in any more precise enactment; being drawn and derived from a practice attributed, I suppose without any foundation, to the lizard or 'stellio' we spoke of just now. Having cast its winter skin, it is reported to swallow it at once, and this out of a malignant grudge lest any should profit by that which, if not now, was of old accounted a specific in certain diseases. The term was then transferred to any malicious wrong whatever done by one person to another.

In other regions it was only to be expected that we should find poetry. Thus it is nothing strange that architecture, which has been called frozen music, and which is poetry embodied in material forms, should have a language of its own, not dry nor hard, not of the mere intellect alone, but one in the forming of which it is evident that the imaginative faculties were at work. To take only one example—this, however, from Gothic art, which naturally yields the most remarkable— what exquisite poetry in the name of 'the rose window' or better still, 'the rose,' given to the rich circular aperture of stained glass, with its leaf-like compartments, in the transepts of a Gothic cathedral! Here indeed we may note an exception from that which usually finds place; for usually art borrows beauty from nature, and very faintly, if at all, reflects back beauty upon her. In this present instance, however, art is so beautiful, has reached so glorious and perfect a development, that if the associations which the rose supplies lend to that window some hues of beauty and a glory which otherwise it would not have, the latter abundantly repays the obligation; and even the rose itself may become lovelier still, associated with those shapes of grace, those rich gorgeous tints, and all the religious symbolism of that in art which has borrowed and bears its name. After this it were little to note the imagination, although that was most real, which dictated the term 'flamboyant' to express the wavy flame-like outline, which, at a particular period of art, the tracery in the Gothic window assumed.

'Godsacre' or 'Godsfield,' is the German name for a burial-ground, and once was our own, though we unfortunately have nearly, if not quite, let it go. What a hope full of immortality does this little word proclaim! how rich is it in all the highest elements of poetry, and of poetry in its noblest alliance, that is, in its alliance with faith— able as it is to cause all loathsome images of death and decay to disappear, not denying them, but suspending, losing, absorbing them in the sublimer thought of the victory over death, of that harvest of life which God shall one day so gloriously reap even there where now seems the very triumphing place of death. Many will not need to be reminded how fine a poem in Longfellow's hands unfolds itself out of this word.

Lastly let me note the pathos of poetry which lies often in the mere tracing of the succession of changes in meaning which certain words have undergone. Thus 'elend' in German, a beautiful word, now signifies wretchedness, but at first it signified exile or banishment. [Footnote: On this word there is an interesting discussion in Weigand's Etym. Dict., and compare Pott, Etym. Forsch. i. 302. Ellinge, an English provincial word of infinite pathos, still common in the south of England, and signifying at once lonely and sad, is not connected, as has been sometimes supposed, with the German elend, but represents Anglo-Saxon ae-lenge, protracted, tedious; see the New English Dictionary (s.v. alange)] The sense of this separation from the native land and from all home delights, as being the woe of all woes, the crown of all sorrows, little by little so penetrated the word, that what at first expressed only one form of misery, has ended by signifying all. It is not a little notable, as showing the same feeling elsewhere at work, that 'essil' (= exilium) in old French signified, not only banishment, but ruin, destruction, misery. In the same manner [Greek: nostimos] meaning at first no more than having to do with a return, comes in the end to signify almost anything which is favourable and auspicious.

Let us then acknowledge man a born poet; if not every man himself a 'maker' yet every one able to rejoice in what others have made, adopting it freely, moving gladly in it as his own most congenial element and sphere. For indeed, as man does not live by bread alone, as little is he content to find in language merely the instrument which shall enable him to buy and sell and get gain, or otherwise make provision for the lower necessities of his animal life. He demands to find in it as well what shall stand in a real relation and correspondence to the higher faculties of his being, shall feed, nourish, and sustain these, shall stir him with images of beauty and suggestions of greatness. Neither here nor anywhere else could he become the mere utilitarian, even if he would. Despite his utmost efforts, were he so far at enmity with his own good as to put them forth, he could not succeed in exhausting his language of the poetical element with which it is penetrated through and through; he could not succeed in stripping it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this; but it will only need for him to become a little better philologer, to go a little deeper into the story of the words which he is using, and he will discover that he is as remote as ever from such an unhappy consummation, from so disastrous a success.

For ourselves, let us desire and attempt nothing of the kind. Our life is not in other ways so full of imagination and poetry that we need give any diligence to empty it of that which it may possess of these. It will always have for us all enough of dull and prosaic and commonplace. What profit can there be in seeking to extend the region of these? Profit there will be none, but on the contrary infinite loss. It is stagnant waters which corrupt themselves; not those in agitation and on which the winds are freely blowing. Words of passion and imagination are, as one so grandly called them of old, 'winds of the soul' ([Greek: psyches anemoi]), to keep it in healthful motion and agitation, to lift it upward and to drive it onward, to preserve it from that unwholesome stagnation which constitutes the fatal preparedness for so many other and worse evils.