Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been
placed at the end of each chapter.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

---

WORDS;
THEIR USE AND ABUSE.

BY

WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D.,

AUTHOR OF “GETTING ON IN THE WORLD,” “ORATORY AND ORATORS,”
ETC., ETC.

Die Sprache ist nichts anderes als der in die Erscheinung tretende Gedanke und beide sind innerlich nur eins und dasselbe.—Becker.

CHICAGO

SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY

1907

---

Copyright, 1876,

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.

---

Copyright, 1884,

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY.

---

Language and thought are inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing. To think is to speak low; to speak is to think aloud. The word is the thought incarnate.—Max Müller.

A winged word hath struck ineradically in a million hearts, and envenomed every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness.—W. S. Landor.

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.—Byron.

A dead language is full of all monumental remembrances of the people who spoke it. Their swords and their shields are in it; their faces are pictured on its walls; and their very voices ring still through its recesses.—B. W. Dwight.

Every sentence of the great writer is like an autograph.... If Milton had endorsed a bill of exchange with half-a-dozen blank-verse lines, it would be as good as his name, and would be accepted as good evidence in court.—Alexander Smith.

If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue, and make melody with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for itself, what is it? Nothing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and at best make money by railways.—Carlyle.

Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables.—T. W. Higginson.

Accustom yourself to reflect on the words you use, hear, or read, their birth, derivation, and history. For if words are not things, they are living powers, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and harmonized.—Coleridge.

Words possess an endless, indefinable, tantalizing charm. They paint humanity in its thoughts, longings, aspirations, struggles, failures—paint it upon a canvas of breath, in the colors of life.—Anon.

Ye know not what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the Heart.—Ascham.

Let him who would rightly understand the grandeur and dignity of speech, meditate on the deep mystery involved in the revelation of the Lord Jesus as the Word of God.—F. W. Farrar.

Words are lighter than the cloud foam

Of the restless ocean spray;

Vainer than the trembling shadow

That the next hour steals away;

By the fall of summer rain-drops

Is the air as deeply stirred;

And the rose leaf that we tread on

Will outlive a word.

Yet on the dull silence breaking

With a lightning flash, a word,

Bearing endless desolation

On its blighting wings, I heard.

Earth can forge no keener weapon,

Dealing surer death and pain,

And the cruel echo answered

Through long years again.

I have known one word hang star-like

O’er a dreary waste of years,

And it only shone the brighter

Looked at through a mist of tears,

While a weary wanderer gathered

Hope and heart on life’s dark way,

By its faithful promise shining

Clearer day by day.

I have known a spirit calmer

Then the calmest lake, and clear

As the heavens that gazed upon it.

With no wave of hope or fear;

But a storm had swept across it.

And its deepest depths were stirred.

Never, never more to slumber.

Only by a word.

Adelaide A. Procter.

---

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

---

The unexpected favor with which this work has been received by the public from year to year, since its publication in 1873, has made the author anxious to render it more worthy of regard. He has, therefore, carefully revised the work, corrected some errors, and added two new chapters, one on “Onomatopes,” the other on “Names of Men,” besides many pages on the subjects of the other chapters.

Professor G. P. Marsh, in his “Lectures on the English Language,” quotes the saying of a distinguished British scholar of the last century, that he had known but three of his countrymen who spoke their native language with uniform grammatical accuracy; and the Professor adds that “the observation of most persons acquainted with English and American society confirms the general truth implied in this declaration.” In this statement, made by one of the most eminent philologists of the day, is found, at least, a partial justification of works like the present, if they are properly written. The author is well aware that, in writing such a book, he is obnoxious to the complaint of Goethe, that “everybody thinks that, because he can speak, he is entitled to speak about language;” he is aware, too, that in his criticisms on the misuses and abuses of words, he has exposed himself to criticism; and it may be that he has been guilty of some of the very sins which he has condemned. If so, he sins in good company, since nearly all of his predecessors, who have written on the same theme, have been found guilty of a similar inconsistency, from Lindley Murray down to Dean Alford, Breen, Moon, Marsh, and Fowler. If the public is to hear no philological sermons till the preachers are faultless, it will have to wait forever. “The only impeccable authors,” says Hazlitt, “are those who never wrote.”

It is hardly necessary to add that the work is designed for popular reading, rather than for scholars. How much the author is indebted to others, he cannot say. He has been travelling, in his own way, over old and well worn ground, and has picked up his materials freely from all the sources within his reach. Non nova, sed nové, has been his aim; he regrets that he has not accomplished it more to his satisfaction. The world, it has been truly said, does not need new thoughts so much as it needs that old thoughts be recast. There are some writers, however, to whom he has been particularly indebted; they are Archbishop Trench, the Rev. Matthew Harrison, author of “The Rise, Progress, and Present Structure of the English Language,” Professor G. P. Marsh, and especially Archdeacon F. W. Farrar, the last of whom in his three linguistic works has shown the ability to invest the driest scientific themes with interest. A list of the books consulted will be found on pages [479, 480].

---

CONTENTS.

---

CHAPTER I.
The Significance of Words	[1]
CHAPTER II.
The Morality in Words	[62]
CHAPTER III.
Grand Words	[105]
CHAPTER IV.
Small Words	[139]
CHAPTER V.
Words without Meaning	[158]
CHAPTER VI.
Some Abuses of Words	[177]
CHAPTER VII.
Saxon Words, or Romanic?	[194]
CHAPTER VIII.
The Secret of Apt Words	[210]
CHAPTER IX.
The Secret of Apt Words (continued)	[229]
CHAPTER X.
Onomatopes	[242]
CHAPTER XI.
The Fallacies in Words	[257]
CHAPTER XII.
The Fallacies in Words (continued)	[295]
CHAPTER XIII.
Names of Men	[323]
CHAPTER XIV.
Nicknames	[345]
CHAPTER XV.
Curiosities of Language	[367]
CHAPTER XVI.
Common Improprieties of Speech	[424]
Index	[481]

---

WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE.

---

[CHAPTER I.]
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS.

“Speech is morning to the mind;

It spreads the beauteous images abroad,

Which else lie dark and buried in the soul.”

La parole, cette main de l’esprit.—Charron.

Syllables govern the world.—Coke.

To the thoughtful man, who has reflected on the common operations of life, which, but for their commonness, would be deemed full of marvel, few things are more wonderful than the origin, structure, history and significance of words. The tongue is the glory of man; for though animals have memory, will and intellect, yet language, which gives us a duplicate and multipliable existence,—enabling mind to communicate with mind,—is the Rubicon which they never have dared to cross. The dog barks as it barked at the creation; the owl hoots in the same octaves in which it screamed ages ago; and the crow of the cock is the same to-day as when it startled the ear of repentant Peter. The song of the lark and the howl of the leopard have continued as unchangeable as the concentric circles of the spider and the waxen hexagon of the bee; and even the stoutest champion of the orang-outang theory of man’s origin will admit that no process of natural selection has yet distilled significant words out of the cries of beasts or the notes of birds. Though we have little reason to doubt that animals think, there is yet no proof that a single noise made by them expresses a thought, and especially an abstraction or a generalization, properties characterizing the language of man. He only, in this world, is able to classify objects which in some respects resemble, and in others differ from one another, and to analyze and decompound the various objects of thought; and to him is limited the privilege of designating by arbitrary signs, and describing by distinctive terms, the things he thus comprehends. Speech is a divine gift. It is the last seal of dignity stamped by God upon His intelligent offspring, and proves, more conclusively than his upright form, or his looks “commercing with the skies,” that he was made in the image of God. Without this crowning gift to man, even reason would have been comparatively valueless; for he would have felt himself to be imprisoned even when at large, solitary in the midst of a crowd; and the society of the wisest of his race would have been as uninstructive as that of barbarians and savages. The rude tongue of a Patagonian or Australian is full of wonders to the philosopher; but as we ascend in the scale of being from the uncouth sounds which express the desires of a savage to the lofty periods of a Cicero or a Chatham, the power of words expands until it attains to regions far above the utmost range of our capacity. It designates, as Novalis has said, God with three letters, and the infinite with as many syllables, though the ideas conveyed by these words are immeasurably beyond the utmost grasp of man. In every relation of life, at every moment of our active being, in every thing we think or do, it is on the meaning and inflection of a word that the direction of our thoughts, and the expression of our will, turn. The soundness of our reasonings, the clearness of our belief and of our judgment, the influence we exert upon others, and the manner in which we are impressed by our fellow-men,—all depend upon a knowledge of the value of words. It is in language that the treasures of human knowledge, the discoveries of Science, and the achievements of Art are chiefly preserved; it is language that furnishes the poet with the airy vehicle for his most delicate fancies, the orator with the elements of his electrifying eloquence, the savant with the record of his classification, the metaphysician with the means of his sharp distinction, the statesman with the drapery of his vast design, and the philosopher with the earthly instrument of his heaven-reaching induction.

“Words,” said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an opponent in the National Assembly, “are things;” and truly they were such when he thundered them forth from the Tribune, full of life, meaning and power. Words are always things, when coming from the lips of a master-spirit, and instinct with his own individuality. Especially is this true of so impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who have thoughts impatient for words, not words starving for thoughts, and who but give utterance to the spirit breathed by the whole Third Estate of a nation. Their words are not merely things, but living things, endowed with power not only to communicate ideas, but to convey, as by spiritual conductors, the shock and thrill which attended their birth. Hazlitt, fond as he was of paradox, did not exaggerate when he said that “words are the only things that live forever.” History shows that temples and palaces, mausoleums and monuments built at enormous cost and during years of toil to perpetuate the memory or preserve the ashes of ancient kings, have perished, and left not even a trace of their existence. The pyramids of Egypt have, indeed, escaped in some degree the changes and chances of thousands of years; yet an earthquake may suddenly engulf these masses of stone, and “leave the sand of the desert as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore.” A sudden accident may cause the destruction of the finest masterpieces of art, and the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvedere, or the Venus de Medicis, upon which millions have gazed with rapture, may be hopelessly injured or irretrievably ruined. A mob shivers into dust the statue of Minerva, whose lips seemed to move, and whose limbs seemed to breathe under the flowing robe; a tasteless director of the Dresden Gallery removes the toning of Correggio’s “Notte,” where the light breaks from the heavenly child, and deprives the picture of one of its fairest charms; an inferior pencil retouches the great Vandyck at Wilton, and destroys the harmony of its colors; and though no such mishap as these befall the product of the painter’s skill, yet how often,—

“When a new world leaps out at his command,

And ready nature waits upon his hand;

When the ripe colors soften and unite,

And sweetly melt into just shade and light;

When mellowing years their full perfection give

And each bold figure just begins to live.

The treacherous colors the fair art betray,

And all the bright creation fades away.”

Not so with words. The language which embodies the ideas and emotions of a great poet or thinker, though entrusted to perishable ink and paper, which a moth or a few drops of water may destroy, is indestructible, and, when his body has turned to dust, he continues to rule men by the power of his thought,—not “from his urn,” like a dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works. Look at the “winged words” of old Homer, into which he breathed the breath of his own spiritual life; how long have they kept on the wing! For twenty-five or thirty centuries they have maintained their flight across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and they are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth. “The ‘Venus’ of Apelles, and the ‘grapes’ of Zeuxis have vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the ‘chained Prometheus’ has outlived the ‘Cupid’ of Praxiteles, and the ‘brazen bull’ of Perillus.”

“How forcible,” says Job, “are right words!” “A word fitly spoken,” says Solomon, “is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” No artificer’s hand, however cunning, can contrive a mechanism comparable with those masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought by him who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful than any of inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly estimated the power of language. In anatomical museums one will sometimes see the analysis of a man,—that is, the mere chemical constituents, so much lime, so much albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how his words tell upon his adversary, battering down the intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with no mind to select and send them home to the mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? “Scholars,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “are men of peace. They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen.”

The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. As John Foster once said, “his diction is not the clothing of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language would be to flay the sentiments alive.” Analyze a speech by either of the great orators I have just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other words for those that are used, and you will find that the latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not even the most insignificant term can be changed without marring the force and completeness of the author’s idea. If any other words can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you might as well think,” says Coleridge, “of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakespeare.”

Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s melodies,—

“Untwisting all the links that tie

The hidden soul of harmony.”

But here is the realm of Milton’s mastery. He electrifies the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion to their effect. “No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying ‘Open Wheat,’ ‘Open Barley,’ to the door which obeyed no sound but ‘Open Sesame.’”

The force and significance which Milton can infuse into the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description of the largest of land animals, in “Paradise Lost.” In a single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start aside from fear of being crushed by the living mass:—

“Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved

His vastness.”

Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates threatens the Arch-Fiend, Satan:—

“Back to thy punishment,

False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings,

Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue

Thy lingering,—or, with one stroke of this dart,

Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!”

“The hand of a master,” says Montgomery, “is felt through every movement of this sentence, especially toward the close, where it seems to grapple with the throat of the reader; the hard staccato stops that well might take the breath, in attempting to pronounce ‘or, with one stroke of this dart,’ are followed by an explosion of sound in the last line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in which, though a full syllable is interpolated even at the cæsural pause, it is carried off almost without the reader perceiving the surplusage.” No poet better understood than Milton the art of heightening the majesty of his strains by an occasional sacrifice of their harmony. By substituting quantities for accented verse, he produces an effect like that of the skilful organist who throws into the full tide of instrumental music an occasional discord, giving intenser sweetness to the notes that follow.

It is this necromantic power over language,—this skill in striking “the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the soul,—which blinds us to the absurdities of “Paradise Lost.” While following this mighty magician of language through

—— “many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”

we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels fight with “villanous saltpetre” and divinities talk Calvinism, puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a school divine. As with Milton, so with his great predecessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pictures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him “the invisible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window.”

The difference in the use of words by different writers is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. Who that is familiar with Bacon’s writings can ever fail to recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave.

“All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he had unguardedly provoked.” Who that is familiar with Dryden’s “full, resounding line,” has not admired the magic effects he produces with the most familiar words? Macaulay well says that in the management of the scientific vocabulary he succeeded as completely as his contemporary, Gibbons, succeeded in carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. Emerson, in speaking of the intense vitality of Montaigne’s words, says that if you cut them, they will bleed. Joubert, in revealing the secret of Rousseau’s charm, says: “He imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles à tous les mots), and poured into them such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our understanding.” So in the weird poetic fictions of Coleridge there is an indescribable witchery of phrase and conceit that affects the imagination as if one had eaten of “the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.”

How much is the magic of Tennyson’s verse due to “the fitting of aptest words to things,” which we find on every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision, but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird influence,

“Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years,”

and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne’s marvellous gift of melody, asks: “Who taught him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we did not know were in the language—a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before, and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, and all words seem to be in his hands.”

Words, with such men, are “nimble and airy servitors,” not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit together, are sometimes “half battles, stronger than most men’s deeds.” What is the secret of the weird-like power of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English writers, he has the most imperial dominion over the resources of expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the precise significance of every word he uses; that he has conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and caprices, the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his thought? Turn to whatever page you will of his writings, and it is not the thorough grasp of his subject, the enormous erudition, the extraordinary breadth and piercing acuteness of intellect which he displays, that excite your greatest surprise; but you feel that here is a man who has gauged the potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy expression,—ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all,—are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh, and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies;

“And now ’tis like all instruments,

Now like a lonely flute,

And now it is an angel’s song,

That makes the heavens be mute.”

The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth century to those of our own day is due not less to their choice and collocation of words than to their weight of thought. There was no writing public nor reading populace in that age; the writers were few and intellectual, and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to studious and thoughtful readers. “The structure of their language,” says Henry Taylor, “is itself an evidence that they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impatience, making everything so clear that he who ran or flew might read. Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he had wings, they might help him to some more genial and profitable employment than that of running like an ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics of diction by which these writers are made more fit than those who have followed them to train the ear and utterance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and intertextures,—the many parts waiting for the ultimate wholeness,—we shall perceive that without distinctive movement and rhythmical significance of a very high order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained in any sort of clearness. One of these writers’ sentences is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to dissociate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elaborately constructed, and complex, though musical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful to an intent reader.”

Few persons are aware how much knowledge is sometimes necessary to give the etymology and definition of a word. In 1839 the British Court of Queen’s Bench,—Sir F. Pollock, Mr. Justice Coleridge, the Attorney General, Sir J. Campbell, and other learned lawyers,—disputed for some hours about the meaning of the word “upon,” as a preposition of time; whether it meant “after” or “before.” It is easy to define words as certain persons satirized by Pascal have defined light: “A luminary movement of luminous bodies”; or as a Western judge once defined murder to a jury: “Murder, gentlemen, is when a man is murderously killed. It is the murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Murder, in short, is—murder.” We have all smiled at Johnson’s definition of network: “Network—anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” Many of the definitions in our dictionaries remind one of Bardolph’s attempt to analyze the term accommodation: “Accommodation,—that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, which is an excellent thing.” Brimstone, for example, the lexicographer defines by telling us that it is sulphur; and then rewards us for the trouble we have had in turning to sulphur, by telling us that it is brimstone. The eccentric Davy Crockett, whose exterior roughness veiled a great deal of mother wit, happily characterized this whole tribe of lexicographers by a remark he once made to a Western member of Congress. When the latter, in a speech on a bill for increasing the number of hospitals, wearied his hearers by incessant repetition,—“Sit down,” whispered Crockett, “you are coming out of the same hole you went in at.” There is a mythical story that the forty members of the French Academy once undertook to define the word crab, and hit upon this, which they deemed quite satisfactory: “Crab,—a small red fish, which walks backward.” “Perfect, gentlemen,” said Cuvier, when interrogated touching the correctness of the definition; “perfect,—only I will make one small observation in natural history. The crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not walk backward. With these exceptions, your definition is admirable.” Too many easily made definitions are liable to similar damaging exceptions.

The truth is, no word can be truly defined until the exact idea is understood, in all its relations, which the word is designed to represent. Let a man undertake to define the word “alkali” or “acid,” for instance, and he will have to encounter some pretty hard problems in chemistry. Lavoisier, the author of the terminology of modern chemistry, tells us that when he undertook to form a nomenclature of that science, and while he proposed to himself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, his work transformed itself by degrees, and without his being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the elements of chemistry. Often a theory or an argument, which seems clear and convincing in its disembodied form, is found to be incoherent and altogether unsatisfactory as soon as it is fixed in words on paper. Samuel Bailey, who held a derivative opinion in favor of Berkeley’s “Theory of Vision,” tells us that having, in the course of a philosophical discussion, occasion to explain it, he found, on attempting to state in his own language the grounds on which it rested, that they no longer appeared to him to be so clear and conclusive as he had fancied them to be. He determined, therefore, to make them the subject of a patient and dispassionate examination; and the result was a clear conviction of the erroneousness of Berkeley’s theory, the philosophical grounds for which conviction he has so ably and luminously set forth in his book on the subject. The truth is, accurate definitions of the terms of any science can only follow accurate and sharply defined notions of the science itself. Try to define the words matter, substance, idea, will, cause, conscience, virtue, right, and you will soon ascertain whether you have grappled with the grand problems or only skimmed the superficies of metaphysics and ethics.

Daniel O’Connell once won a law-suit by the knowledge furnished him of the etymology of a word. He was engaged in a case where the matter at issue was certain river-rights, especially touching a branch of the stream known by the name of the “Lax Weir.” His clients were in possession of rights formerly possessed by a defunct salmon-fishing company, formed by strangers from Denmark, and they claimed the privilege of obstructing the “Lax Weir” for the purposes of their fishery, while the opposite party contended that it should be open to navigation. A natural inference from the name of the piece of water in question seemed to turn the scale against O’Connell; for how could he establish the right to make that a close weir which, ever since the first existence of the fishery, had been notoriously a lax one? His cause seemed desperate, and he had given up all hope of success, when victory was wrested from his adversaries by a couple of lines on a scrap of paper that was handed to him across the court. These lines informed him that in the language of Germany, and the north of Europe, lachs, or lax, means a salmon. The “Lax Weir” was simply a salmon weir. By the aid of this bit of philological knowledge, O’Connell won not only a verdict for his client, but for himself a great and sudden growth of his reputation as a young advocate.

Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed in the study of an English dictionary. Lord Chatham read the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, examining each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar import and modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to bring the whole range of our language completely under his control. One of the most distinguished American authors is said to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through about once a year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; but, in fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the language that lies buried in the pages of Noah Webster. It is only by thus working in the mines of language that one can fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using these with no subtle discrimination of their meanings. William Pinkney, the great American advocate, studied the English language profoundly, not so much to acquaint himself with the nice distinctions of its philosophical terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and splendor of expression. He studied the dictionary, page after page, content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and derivative stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his students; “You don’t want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.” The leading languages of the world are full of such words, “opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall to us great passages of eloquence, or of noble poetry, and bring in their train the whole splendor of such passages, when they are uttered.”

Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command the largest possible number of terms, both “rich and rare,”—words most vivid and effective,—really spirit-stirring words; for words there are, as every poet knows, whose sound is an echo to the sense,—words which, while by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind, have also a sound and an association which are like music to the ear, and a picture to the eye,—vivid, graphic, and picturesque words, that make you almost see the thing described. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts, their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he would take pains to make it his own by using it, as speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon expressions like “the sea-shouldering whale” of Spenser, he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. It is said of Theophile Gautier, whose language is remarkable for its copiousness and splendor, that he enriched his picturesque vocabulary from the most recondite sources, and that his favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved words for themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and kept a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced at effective points.

The question has been often discussed whether, if man were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able to think, and to express his thought. The example of the deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch,—using combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,—appears to show that he might find a partial substitute for his present means of reflection. The telegraph and railway signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words to which it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated with a particular act, and the interposition of words becomes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the Roman actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus, both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful effect, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal-bag before the assembly, declaring that “it lacked meal,” these verbal economists said that “the mention of the sack was superfluous.” When the Scythian ambassadors wished to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless he could soar like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts. Every one has heard of the Englishman in China, who, wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay before him, asked “Quack, quack?” and received in reply the words “Bow-wow.” The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy that it is said that when King Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and though made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were perfectly intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand being employed. Energetic and faithful, however, as gesture is as a means of expression, it is in the domain of feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and enforcing our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The conventionality of language, which can be parroted where there is little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its force; and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or a gesture is often more eloquent than the most elaborate speech. But it is only the most general facts of a situation that gesture can express; it is incapable of distinguishing or decomposing them, and utterly fails to express the delicate shades of difference of which verbal expression is capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan, and laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, subjective, and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a judgment, or a cognition.

Facts like these tend to show that man might still have been, as the root of the word “man” implies in Sanskrit, “a thinking being,” though he had never been a “speech-dividing” being; but it is evident that his range of thought would have been exceedingly narrow, and that his mightiest triumphs over nature would have been impossible. While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that

“Thought leapt out to wed with thought,

Ere thought could wed itself to speech,”

yet there is an intimate relation between ratio and oratio, and it may well be doubted whether, without some signs, verbal or of another sort, thought, except of the simplest kind, would not have been beyond man’s power. Long use has so familiarized us with language, we employ it so readily, and without conscious effort, that we are apt to regard it as a matter of course, and become blind to its mystery and deep significance. We rarely think of the long and changeful history through which each word we utter has passed,—of the many changes in form and changes in signification it has undergone,—and of the time and toil spent in its invention and elaboration by successive generations of thinkers and speakers. Still less do we think how different man’s history would have been, how comparatively useless would have been all his other endowments, had God not given him the faculties “which, out of the shrieks of birds in the forest, the roar of beasts, the murmur of rushing waters, the sighing of the wind, and his own impulsive ejaculations, have constructed the great instrument that Demosthenes, and Shakespeare, and Massillon wielded, the instrument by which the laws of the universe are unfolded, and the subtle workings of the human heart brought to light.” Language is not only a means of communication between man and man, but it has other functions hardly less important. It is only by its aid that we are able to analyze our complex impressions, to preserve the results of the analysis, and to abbreviate the processes of thought.

Were we content with the bare reception of visual impressions, we could to some extent dispense with words; but as the mind does not receive its impressions passively, but reflects upon them, decomposes them into their parts, and compares them with notions already stored up, it becomes necessary to give to each of these elements a name. By virtue of these names we are able to keep them apart in the mind, and to recall them with precision and facility, just as the chemist by the labels on his jars, or the gardener by those on his flower-pots, is enabled to identify the substances these vessels contain. Thus reflections which when past might have been dissipated forever, are by their connection with language brought always within reach. Who can estimate the amount of investigation and thought which are represented by such words as gravitation, chemical affinity, atomic weight, capital, inverse proportion, polarity, and inertia,—words which are each the quintessence and final result of an infinite number of anterior mental processes, and which may be compared to the paper money, or bills of exchange, by which the world’s wealth may be inclosed in envelopes and sent swiftly to the farthest centres of commerce? Who can estimate the inconvenience that would result, and the degree in which mental activity would be arrested, were we compelled to do without these comprehensive words which epitomize theories, sum up the labors of the past, and facilitate and abridge future mental processes? The effect would be to restrict all scientific discovery as effectually as commerce and exchange would be restricted, if all transactions had to be carried on with iron or copper as the sole medium of mercantile intercourse.

Language has thus an educational value, for in learning words we are learning to discriminate things. “As the distinctions between the relations of objects grow more numerous, involved, and subtle, it becomes more analytic, to be able to express them; and, inversely, those who are born to be the heirs of a highly analytic language, must needs learn to think up to it, to observe and distinguish all the relations of objects, for which they find the expressions already formed; so that we have an instructor for the thinking powers in that speech which we are apt to deem no more than their handmaid and minister.” No two things, indeed, are more closely connected than poverty of language and poverty of thought. Language is, on one side, as truly the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other that which feeds and sustains it. Among the “inarticulate ones” of the world, there may be, for aught we know, not a few in whose minds are ideas as grand, pictures as vivid and beautiful, as ever haunted the brain of a poet; but lacking the words which only can express their conceptions, or reveal them in their true majesty to themselves, they must remain “mute, inglorious Miltons” forever. A man of genius who is illiterate, or who has little command of language, is like a painter with no pigments but gray and dun. How, then, shall he paint the purple and crimson of the sunset? Though he may have made the circuit of the world, and gazed on the main wonders of Nature and of Art, he will have little to say of them beyond commonplace. In bridging the chasm between such a man and one of high culture, the acquisition of words plays as important a part as the acquisition of ideas.

It has been justly said that no man can learn from or communicate to another more than the words they are familiar with either express or can be made to express. The deep degradation of the savage is due as much to the brutal poverty of his language as to other causes. This poverty, again, is due to that deficiency of the power of abstraction which characterizes savages of every land. A savage may have a dozen verbs for “I am here,” “I am well,” “I am thirsty,” etc.; but he has no word for “am”: he may have a dozen words for “my head,” “your head,” etc.; but he can hardly conceive of a head apart from its owner. Nearly all the tongues of the American savages are polysynthetic; that is, whole clauses and even whole sentences are compressed together so violently, that often no single syllable would be capable of separate use. The Abbé Domenech states that such is the absolute deficiency of the simplest abstractions in some of these languages that an Indian cannot say “I smoke” without using such a number of concrete pictures that his immensely long word to represent that monosyllabic action means: “I breathe the vapor of a fire of herb which burns in a stone bowl wedged into a pierced stone.” To express the idea of “day,” the Pawnees use such a word as shakoorooceshairet, and their word for “tooth” is the fearful polysyllable khotsiakatatkhusin! The word for “tongue” in Tlatskanai has twenty-two letters. Though these vocables, which bristle with more consonants than the four sneezes of a Russian name of note, would be enough, as De Quincey says, “to splinter the teeth of a crocodile,” yet Mexican has sounds even more ear-splitting. In this language the common address to a priest is the one word Notlazomahuizteopixcatatzin; that is, “Venerable priest, whom I honor as a father.” A fagot is tlatlatlalpistiteutli, and “if the fagot were of green wood, it could hardly make a greater splutter in the fire.” A lover would have been obliged to say “I love you,” in this language, in this style, ni-mits-tsikāwakā-tlasolta; and instead of a kiss he would have had to ask for a tetenna-miquilitzli. “Dieu merci!” exclaims the French writer who states this fact, “quand on a prononcé le mot on a bien mérité la chose.”

It is easy to see, from these facts, what an obstacle the language of the savage presents to his civilization. Let us suppose a savage to possess extraordinary natural endowments, and to learn any one of the leading languages of Europe; is it not easy to see that he would find himself prepared for labor in departments of mental effort which had been before utterly inaccessible to him, and that he would feel that his powers had been cheated out of their action by this possession of only inferior tools? Hence the knowledge of words is not an elegant accomplishment only, not a luxury, but a positive necessity of the civilized and cultivated man. It is necessary not only to him who would express himself, but to him who would think, with precision and effect. There is, indeed, no higher proof of thorough and accurate culture than the fact that a writer, instead of employing words loosely and at hap-hazard, chooses only those which are the exact vesture of his thought. As he only can be called a well dressed man whose clothes exactly fit him, being neither small and shrunken, nor loose and baggy, so it is the first characteristic of a good style that the words fit close to the ideas. They will be neither too big here, hanging like a giant’s robe on the limbs of a dwarf, nor too small there, like a boy’s garments into which a man has painfully squeezed himself; but will be the exact correspondents and perfect exponents of his thought. Between the most synonymous words a careful writer will have a choice; for, strictly speaking, there are no synonyms in a language, the most closely resembling and apparently equivalent terms having some nice shade of distinction,—a fine illustration of which is found in Ben Jonson’s line, “Men may securely sin, but safely never”; and, again, in the reply with which Sydney Smith used to meet the cant about popular education in England: “Pooh! pooh! it is the worst educated country in the world, I grant you; but it is the best instructed.” William Pitt was a remarkable example of this precision of style. Fox said of him: “Though I am myself never at a loss for a word, Pitt not only has a word, but the word,—the very word,—to express his meaning.” Robert Hall chose his words with a still more fastidious nicety, and he gave as one reason for his writing so little, that he could so rarely approach the realization of his own beau-idéal of a perfect style. It is related of him that, when he was correcting the proofs of his sermon on “Modern Infidelity,” on coming to the famous passage, “Eternal God, on what are thine enemies intent? What are those enterprises of guilt and horror, that, for the safety of their performers, require to be enveloped in a darkness which the eye of Heaven must not penetrate?”—he exclaimed to his friend, Dr. Gregory: “Penetrate! did I say penetrate, sir, when I preached it?” “Yes.” “Do you think, sir, I may venture to alter it? for no man who considers the force of the English language would use a word of three syllables there but from absolute necessity. For penetrate put pierce: pierce is the word, sir, and the only word, to be used there.”

John Foster was a yet more striking example of this conscientiousness and severity in discriminating words. Never, perhaps, was there a writer the electric action of whose mind, telegraphing with all nature’s works, was so in contrast with its action in writing. Here it was almost painfully slow, like the expression of some costly oil, drop by drop. He would spend whole days on a few short sentences, passing each word under his concentrated scrutiny, so that each, challenged and examined, took its place in the structure like an inspected soldier in the ranks. When Chalmers, after a visit to London, was asked what Foster was about, he replied: “Hard at it, at the rate of a line a week.” Read a page of the essay on “Decision of Character,” and you will feel that this was scarcely an exaggeration,—that he stood by the ringing anvil till every word was forged into a bolt. Few persons know how hard easy writing is. Who that reads the light, sparkling verse of Thomas Moore, dreams of the mental pangs, the long and anxious thought, which a single word often cost him? Irving tells us that he was once riding with the Irish poet in the streets of Paris, when the hackney-coach went suddenly into a deep rut, out of which it came with such a jolt as to send their pates bump against the roof. “By Jove, I’ve got it!” cried Moore, clapping his hands with great glee. “Got what?” said Irving. “Why,” said the poet, “that word I’ve been hunting for six weeks, to complete my last song. That rascally driver has jolted it out of me.”

The ancient writers and speakers were even more nice and fastidious than the moderns, in their choice and arrangement of words. Virgil, after having spent eleven years in the composition of the Æneid, intended to devote three years to its revision; but, being prevented by his last sickness from giving it the finishing touches which his exquisite judgment deemed necessary, he directed his friends to burn it. The great orator of Athens, to form his style, transcribed Thucydides again and again. He insisted that it was not enough that the orator, in order to prepare for delivery in public, should write down his thoughts,—he must, as it were, sculpture them in brass. He must not content himself with that loose use of language which characterizes a thoughtless fluency, but his words must have a precise and exact look, like newly minted coin, with sharply cut edges and devices. That Demosthenes himself “recked his own rede” in this matter we have abundant proof in almost every page of his great speeches. In his masterpieces we are introduced to mysteries of prose composition of which the moderns know nothing. We find him, as a German critic has remarked, bestowing incredible pains, not only upon the choice of words, but upon the sequence of long and short syllables, not in order to produce a regularly recurring metre, but to express the most various emotions of the mind by a suitable and ever-changing rhythm. It is in this art of ordering words with reference to their effect, even more, perhaps, than in the action for which his name is a synonym, that he exhibits his consummate dexterity as an orator. Change their order, and you at once break the charm. The rhythm, in fact, is the sense. You destroy the significance of the sentence as well as its ring; you lessen the intensity of the meaning as well as the verbal force. “At his pleasure,” says Professor Marsh, “he separates his lightning and his thunder by an interval that allows his hearer half to forget the coming detonation, or he instantaneously follows up the dazzling flash with a pealing explosion that stuns, prostrates and crushes the stoutest opponent.”

Not less did the Roman orators consult the laws of euphonic sequence or metrical convenience, and arrange their words in such a succession of articulate sounds as would fall most pleasingly on the ear. The wonderful effects which sometimes attended their elocution were, in all probability, chiefly owing to their exquisite choice of words and their skill in musical concords. It was by the charm of numbers, as well as by the strength of reason, that Cicero confounded Catiline and silenced the eloquent Hortensius. It was this that deprived Curio of all power of recollection when he rose to oppose that great master of enchanting rhetoric; it was this that made even Cæsar himself tremble, and at last change his determined purpose, and acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. When the Roman orator, Carbo, pronounced, on a certain occasion, the sentence, “Patris dictum sapiens temeritas filii comprobavit,” it was astonishing, says Cicero, to observe the general applause which followed that harmonious close. Doubtless we are ignorant of the art of pronouncing that period with its genuine emphasis; but Cicero assures us that had the final measure,—what is technically called a dichoree,—been changed, and the words placed in a different order, their whole effect would have been absolutely destroyed. With the same exquisite sensibility to numbers, an ancient writer says that a similar result would follow, if, in reading the first line of the Æneid,

“Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris.”

instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is being long, and us short).

It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement of words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer’s own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is “the ordered march of his lordly prose” that is the secret of Macaulay’s charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume’s periods which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.

It has been truly said by a brilliant New England writer that this mystery of style,—why it is, that when one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,—has never been sounded. “One can understand a little how the wink or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,—who has fathomed yet this wonder?”

From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans of the day than this,—that the study is useless, because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle’s version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth’s Cicero, Morris’s Virgil, Martin’s Horace, or Carter’s Epictetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of many, upon Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” All this seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,—the exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,—are precisely those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations of them are no more like the original than a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a writer,—the life and spirit,—all that is idiomatic, peculiar, or characteristic,—all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in Horace,—evaporates in a translation.

It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost every word in one language has equivalents in every other; but a critical study of language shows that, with the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts, there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between any two words in different tongues. Compare any two languages, and you will find that there are, as the mathematicians would say, many incommensurable quantities, many words in each untranslatable into the other, and that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to supply an equivalent. To use De Quincey’s happy image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative, is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap. Even words denoting sensible objects are not always exact equivalents in any two languages. It might be supposed that a berg (the German for mountain or hill) was a berg all the world over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word expressing it in another. Yet, as a late German writer[1] has said, this is far from being the case. The English “mountain,” for instance, refers to something bigger than the German berg. On the other hand, “hill,” which has the next lower signification, in its many meanings is far too diminutive for the German term, which finds no exact rendering in any English vocable.

A comparison of the best English versions of the New Testament with the original, strikingly shows the inadequacy of the happiest translations. Even in the Revised Version, upon which an enormous amount of labor was expended by the best scholars in England and the United States, many niceties of expression which mark the original fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can draw a clear line where other languages can only make a blot, the translators have been compelled to use the same English word for different Greek ones, and thus obliterate many fine distinctions which are essential to the meaning. Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown, it is impossible to exhibit in English the delicate shades of difference in meaning which appear in the Greek between the two verbs both rendered “love,”[2] in John xxi, 15-17. “The word first employed by Christ is a very common one in the New Testament, and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection. It is used of God’s love to man, as in John iii, 16—‘God so loved the world,’ etc.—and of man’s love to God, as in Matt. xxii, 37—‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’ etc. The other word more particularly implies that warmth of feeling which exists between friends. Thus, it is used respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: ‘Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick;’ and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John himself, when he is spoken of as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Now, the use of the one word at first by Christ serves to remind St. Peter of the claim which his Divine Master had upon his deep, reverential love. But the Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness, does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole heart flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other word, and assures the Saviour at least of a fervent personal affection. Christ then repeats His question, still using the same verb, and Peter replies as before. But on asking the question for the third time, Christ graciously adopts the term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to him again as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh to His own loving heart.”[3] Now all this is lost through the comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent the subtle distinctions of the Greek original are and must be lost in the translation, may be guessed from the fact that there are no fewer than ten Greek words which have been rendered “appoint” in the ordinary version, no fewer than fourteen which stand for “give,” and no fewer than twenty-one which correspond to “depart.”

Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle an essence to be poured from one vessel into another without loss. Of Cicero’s elegant and copious rhetoric, of the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of Martial’s jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling through an English medium; but of the beauties and splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,—never. As soon will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator echo the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the “Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be given, or another poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the form in altering the form. Language is a strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation of words upon the mind that the translator finds himself baffled. Words, as Cowper said of books, “are not seldom talismans and spells.” They have, especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of necromantic power, aside from their significance as representative signs. Over and above their meanings as given in the dictionary, they connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by their employment for hundreds of years. There are in every language certain magical words, which, though they can be translated into other tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corresponding words in those tongues. Such words in English are gentleman, comfort, and home, about each of which cluster a multitude of associations which are not suggested by any foreign words by which they can be rendered. There is in poetry a mingling of sound and sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if the meaning be also preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of hemp. Language, it cannot be too often repeated, is not the dress of thought; it is its living expression, and controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters.

How many abortive attempts have been made to translate the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” into English verse! What havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of the grandest passages in the old bard! The former, it has been well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epigrams, sparkling and cold as the “Heroic Epistles” of Ovid; the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achæans, the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded as an English poem, Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” is unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified production; but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into another language, it is but a caput mortuum, containing but little more of Homer than the names and events. The fervid and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the mythologic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and freshness of the images,—all that breathes of an earlier world, and of the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue sky, of the old Ægean,—all this, as a critic has observed, “is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like words of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a literary artist; instead of the ever varied, resounding swell of the hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely balanced modern couplet. In short, the old bard is stripped of his flowing chlamys and his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled shoes, the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig of the eighteenth century.” Chapman, who has more of the spirit of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from the Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast that it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. Lord Derby and William C. Bryant have been more successful in many respects than Pope or Cowper; but each has gained some advantages by compensating defects.

Did Dryden succeed better when he put the “Æneid” into verse? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodiment of those vulgar impressions which, when the old Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English literature know what havoc Dryden made of “Paradise Lost,” when he attempted, even in the same language, to put it into rhyme,—a proposal to do which drew from Milton the contemptuous remark: “Ay, young man; you can tag my rhymes.” A man of genius never made a more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions of “the first finder of our faire language” contain much admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer’s. They are simply elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet,—above all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language, the exquisite tone of naïveté, which, like the lispings of infancy, give such a charm to his verse,—utterly vanish. Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply because failure was inevitable,—because this aroma of antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern language, is sure to evaporate.

All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone,—the essence, the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give the expression of one of Raphael’s or Titian’s masterpieces, as any man expect, by any other words than those which a great poet has used, to convey the same meaning. Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a manner of his own, without which the identity and truth of his work are lost. If, then, the meaning and spirit of a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another, so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must it not a fortiori be impossible to transport them faithfully across the barriers which divide one language from another, and antiquity from modern times?

How many ineffectual attempts have been made to translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to give the right meaning, or something like the meaning, of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such exquisite delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imitation. All experience shows that the traduttore must necessarily be tradittore,—the translator, a traducer of the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric. The special imagination of the poet, it has been well said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, subtlest meanings of words; skilled in their finest sympathies; powerful to make them yield a meaning which another never could have extracted from them. It is of the very essence of the poet’s art, so that, in the highest exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the rendering of an idea in appropriate language; but the conception, and the words in which it is conveyed, are a simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth full-grown, in its panoply of radiant utterance.

The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody ever so skilfully, and you change the effect. You cannot translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring the raw material of the original sentiment into his own tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is altered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is as much contrast between the best translation and the original of a great author, as between a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,—a barely “good” original book to any lifeless translation. A living dog is better than a dead lion; for the external attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit that makes them terrible.

The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of whose onomatopœia we are ignorant, will appear still more clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous blunders are made in translating even from one living language into another. Few English-speaking persons can understand the audacity of Racine, so highly applauded by the French, in introducing the words chien and sel into poetry; “dog” and “salt” may be used by us without danger; but, on the other hand, we may not talk of “entrails” in the way the French do. Every one has heard of the Frenchman, who translated the majestic exclamation of Milton’s Satan, “Hail! horrors, hail!” by “Comment vous portez-vous, Messieurs les Horreurs, comment vous portez-vous?” “How do you do, horrors, how do you do?” Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following passage from Shakespeare in his own tongue,

“Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,

So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,”

translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off with you!” In the opera of “Macbetto,” the term “hell-broth” in the witches’ scene is rendered in Italian polto inferno. Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by a translator of Alexander Smith’s “Life-Drama,” who metamorphoses the expression, “clothes me with kingdoms,” into “me fait un vêtement de royaumes,”—“makes me a garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer as Lord Mahon, in his “History of the War of the Succession in Spain,” translates the French word abbé by “abbot.” One of the chief difficulties in translating into a foreign language is that, though every word the translator uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the words arène and rive are both to be found in the best French writers; yet if a foreigner, not familiar with the niceties of that language, should write

“Sur la rive du fleuve amassant de l’arène,”

he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by the most illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom will not admit of the expression sur la rive du fleuve, correct though each word may be taken singly, but requires the phrase sur le bord de la rivière, as it does amasser du sable, and not amasser de l’arène. What can be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium, where, he says, the air was

“Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings,”

a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the translator to hit so near to the original as to write

“Stirred with the noise of quivering wings,”

will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let one translate into another language the following line of Shakespeare,

“The learned pate ducks to the golden fool,”

and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the words we have italicized would be reproduced?

The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly exemplified by comparing the following lines of Shakespeare with such a version as we might expect in another language:

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.”

A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of poetry, after some such fashion as the following:

“With what a charm the moon serene and bright

Lends on the bank its soft reflected light!

Sit we, I pray, and let us sweetly hear

The strains melodious, with a raptured ear;

For soft retreats, and night’s impressive hour,

To harmony impart divinest power.”

In view of all these considerations what can be more untrue than the statement so often made, that to be capable of easy translation is a test of the excellence of a composition? This doctrine, it has been well observed, goes upon the assumption that one language is just like another language,—that every language has all the ideas, turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associations, abstractions, points of view which every other language has. “Now, as far as regards Science, it is true that all languages are pretty much alike for the purposes of Science; but even in this respect some are more suitable than others, which have to coin words or to borrow them, in order to express scientific ideas. But if languages are not all equally adapted even to furnish symbols for those universal and eternal truths in which Science consists, how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, equally happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities of thought of some original and fertile mind, who has availed himself of one of them? * * *

“It seems that a really great author must admit of translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as in his own. Then Shakespeare is a genius because he can be translated into German, and not a genius because he cannot be translated into French. The multiplication table is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because it loses nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to belong to any one language whatever. Whereas I should rather have conceived that, in proportion as ideas are novel and recondite, they would be difficult to put into words, and that the very fact of their having insinuated themselves into one language would diminish the chance of that happy accident being repeated in another. In the language of savages you can hardly express any idea or act of the intellect at all. Is the tongue of the Hottentot or Esquimau to be made the measure of the genius of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cervantes?”[4]

The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot be played upon another. To the most cunning writer that ever tried to translate the beauties of an author into a foreign tongue, we may say in the language of a French critic: “You are that ignorant musician who plays his part exactly, not skipping a single note, nor neglecting a rest,—only what is written in the key of fa, he plays in the key of sol. Faithful translator!”

When we think of the marvellous moral influence which words have exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that the ancients believed there was a subtle sorcery in them, “a certain bewitchery or fascination,” indicating that language is of mystic origin. The Jews, believing that God had revealed a full-grown language to mankind, attached a divine character to language, and supposed that there was a natural and necessary connection between words and things. The name of a person was not a mere conventional sign, but an essential attribute, an integral part of the person himself. Hence we find in Genesis no less than fifty derivations of names, in almost all of which the derivation connects the name, prophetically or otherwise, with some event in the person’s life. Hence, also, the practice, under certain conditions, of changing men’s names, as illustrated in the histories of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joshua and others. “Call me not Naomi (pleasant), but Mara (bitter),” said the broken-hearted widow of Elimelech. “Even in the New Testament we find our Lord Himself in a solemn moment fixing on the mind of His greatest apostle a new and solemn significance given to the name he bore. ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church.’ St. Paul also, is probably playing upon a name when, in Phil. iv, 3, he affectionately addresses a friend as γνήσιε Σύζυγε, ‘true yoke fellow,’ since it is an ancient and very probable supposition that Syzygus or Yokefellow is there a proper name.” The Gothic nations supposed that even their mysterious alphabetical characters, called “Runes,” possessed magical powers; that they could stop a sailing vessel or a flying arrow,—that they could excite love or hate, or even raise the dead. The Greeks believed that there was a necessary, mysterious connection between words and the objects they signified, so that man unconsciously expressed, in the words whereby he named things or persons, their innermost being and future destiny, as though in a symbol incomprehensible to himself. The accidental good omen in the name of an envoy who was called Hegesistratos, or “leader of an army,” decided a Greek general to assist the Samians, and led to the battle of Mycale. The Romans, in their levies, took care to enrol first names of good omen, such as Victor, Valerius, Salvius, Felix, and Faustus. Cæsar gave a command in Spain to an obscure Scipio, merely for the omen which his name involved. When an expedition had been planned under the leadership of Atrius Niger, the soldiers absolutely refused to proceed under a commander of so ill-omened a name,—dux abominandi nominis,—it being, as De Quincey says, “a pleonasm of darkness.” The same deep conviction that words are powers is seen in the favete linguis and bona verba quæso of the Romans, by which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any word suggestive of ill fortune, lest the event so suggested to the imagination should actually occur. So they were careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any word directly expressive of death or other calamity, saying vixit instead of mortuus est, and “be the event fortunate or otherwise,” instead of “adverse.” The name Egesta they changed into Segesta, Maleventum into Beneventum, Axeinos into Euxine, and Epidamnus into Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of damnum, or detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has prevailed,—an illustration of which we have in the life of Pope Adrian VI, who, when elected, dared not retain his own name, as he wished, because he was told by his cardinals that every Pope who had done so had died in the first year of his reign.[5]

That there is a secret instinct which leads even the most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, is illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in “the black art.” In the Island of Java, a fearful influence, it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there is to write a man’s name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a bier, an image made of paste, and then put it in a place where two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is believed, will be wrought against the person whose name is so inscribed.

But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day, hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish examples of their ominous force. Mr. Maurice says with truth, that “a light flashes out of a word sometimes which frightens one. It is a common word; one wonders how one has dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when there were such meanings hidden in it.” Shakespeare makes one of his characters say of another, “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs”; and there are, indeed, words which are sharper than drawn swords, which give more pain than a score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused. How often has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a sublime yet undecided purpose,—a word of sympathy opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect of heaven,—a word of truth fired a man of action to do a deed which has saved a nation or a cause,—or a genius to write words which have gone ringing down the ages!

“I have known a word more gentle

Than the breath of summer air;

In a listening heart it nestled,

And it lived forever there.

Not the beating of its prison

Stirred it ever, night or day;

Only with the heart’s last throbbing

Could it ever fade away.”

A late writer has truly said that “there may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”

“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.”

The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, government, or interests; and nations of one speech, though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds yet more widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof. Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of Arndt, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” was founded upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which the song was received showed that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. When a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed, and this can be done only by killing its language; for it is through its language that its national prejudices, its loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done, the old language, slowly dying out,—if, indeed, it dies at all,—has time to convey the national traditions into the new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of which that language is the representative and the vehicle, has been permitted by the English government to die a lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexistence of two languages in a state is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of townships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of our foreign population.

The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of the middle ages, appear to be glebæ adscriptitiæ, and to extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered Greece, could not plant her language there. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire adopted the languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slavs who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, as had Charlemagne before him.

England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,—German; but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The strongest bond of union between the different States of this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political structure or sagacity of political administration could hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of speech,—the common language in which we express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,—this is like a soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?

As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other nations than the exploration through their languages of their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowledge of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate in some respects than he could gain by personal intercourse with them. He will feel the pulse of their national life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power of words; but, great as is their power, and though, when nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, after all, the man who makes them potent. As it was not the famous needle gun, destructive as it is, which won the late Prussian victories, but the intelligence and discipline of the Prussian soldier,—the man behind the gun, educated in the best common schools in the world,—so it is the latent heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives them momentum and projectile force. The same words, coming from one person, are as the idle wind that kisses the cheeks; coming from another, they are the cannon shot that pierces the target in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is the same in each case; the enormous difference lies in the man who says it. The man fills out, crowds his words with meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s work; or he makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their destination, or to do any execution should they hit the mark. The weight and value of opinions and sentiments depend oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than upon the degree in which they have been organized into the nature of the person who utters them; their force, less upon their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored away in their formation, which is liberated in their publication.

There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence have been produced by words which, when read, strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying “Mesopotamia!” probably only burlesques an actual fact.

Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that “every sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long.” Willis says that every word of Webster weighs a pound. College sophomores, newly fledged lawyers, and representatives from Bunkumville, often display more fluency than the New Hampshire giant; but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to the patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone, but in a great degree the added weight of his temper and constitution, the trip-hammer momentum with which he makes it fall upon the theory he means to crush. Even the vast mass of the man helped, too, to make his words impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and overwhelmingly pressed his thought upon them, with the immense current of his physical energy.” When the great champion of New England said, in the United States Senate, “There are Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever,” it was the weight of character, and of all the associations connected with it, which changed that which, uttered by another, would have been the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quickened the pulse even of “the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, which had weighed and felt all the meaning which those three spots represent in the stormy history of the world. It was this which gave such prodigious power to the words of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of superiority, the scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl of his voice, “like thunder heard remote,” the impending lightnings which seemed ready to dart from his eyes, and, above all, the evidence which these furnished of an imperious and overwhelming will, that abashed the proudest peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing from other lips, would have been as harmless as pop-guns.

In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the creative individuality projected into the words that makes the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is said that Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by the simple words, “Who said that?” An acute American writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essentially commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of hell,” the metaphor may not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke glaring through it.[6] What can be more effective than the speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”? Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that, had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers not merely what is said, but who speaks, and whence he says it.

“Let but a lord once own the happy lines,

How the wit brightens, how the style refines!”

says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, that

“Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway.”

Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of position and character, when he makes Hecuba entreat Ulysses to intercede for her; “for the arguments,” says she, “which are uttered by men of repute, are very different in strength from those uttered by men unknown.”

The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter the word “grand,” and our sense of the word is modified according to our knowledge of the men. The conceptions represented by the words a man uses, it is evident, are different from every other man’s; and into this difference enter all his individuality of character, the depth or the shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education, the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that distinguishes him from another man.

Mr. Whipple says truly that “there are no more simple words than ‘green,’ ‘sweetness,’ and ‘rest,’ yet what depth and intensity of significance shine in Chaucer’s ‘green’; what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates ‘sweetness,’ as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards; what celestial repose beams from ‘rest’ as it lies on the page of Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the resources of language; yet they are expressed in common words, transfigured, sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality which streams through them.” The same critic, in speaking of style as the measure of a writer’s power, observes that “the marvel of Shakespeare’s diction is its immense suggestiveness,—his power of radiating through new verbal combinations, or through single expressions, a life and meaning which they do not retain in their removal to dictionaries. When the thought is so subtle, or the emotion so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it cannot be flashed upon the ‘inward eye,’ it is hinted to the inward ear by some exquisite variation of tone. An American essayist on Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of the impossibility of acting or reciting his plays, refers to this magical suggestiveness in a sentence almost as remarkable as the thing it describes. ‘The recitation,’ he says, ‘begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes!’ He who has not felt this witchery in Shakespeare’s style has never read him. He may have looked at the words, but has never looked into them.”

The fact that words are never taken absolutely,—that they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, but of natures,—that they are media for the emission and transpiration of character,—is one that cannot be too deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent young men who wonder that the words which they utter with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with their hearers, should ask themselves whether their characters are such as to give weight to their words. As in engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man’s character should be a hundred times heavier than what he says. When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the “universe,” the word has quite another meaning than when it is used by plain John Smith, whose ideas have never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a man’s friend gives him religious advice, and talks of “the solemn responsibilities of life,” it makes a vast difference in the weight of the words whether they come from one who has been tried and proved in the world’s fiery furnace, and whose whole life has been a trip-hammer to drive home what he says, or from a callow youth who prates of that which he feels not, and testifies to things which are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a hollow ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks of “trials and tribulations” which he has never felt. “Words,” says the learned Selden, “must be fitted to a man’s mouth. ’Twas well said by the fellow that was to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired first to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.”

Few things are more interesting in the study of a language, than to note how much it gains by time and culture. In its vocabulary, its forms, and its euphonic and other changes, it embodies the mental growth and modifications of thousands of minds. It enriches itself with all the intellectual spoils of the people that use it, and with the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed, and refined. The language of an old and highly civilized people differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad and majestic river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce of the world, differs from the tiny streamlet in which it had its origin. And yet it is no less true that, as Max Müller has observed, since the beginning of the world no new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements of nature. There is a constant change in language, a coming and going of words; but no man can ever invent an entirely new word. Before a novel term can be introduced into use, there must be some connection with a former term,—a bridge to enable the mind to pass over to the new word. Equally true is it that when a vocable has dropped out of the language,—has become dead or obsolete,—it is almost as impossible to call it back to life as it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope, it is true, speaks of commanding “old words that have long slept to wake;” and Horace declares that many words will be born again that have seemingly dropped into their graves. But it is certain that, as Prof. Craik says, “very little revivification has ever taken place in human speech,” and that one may more easily introduce into a language a dozen new words than restore to general use an old one that has been discarded. It is true that when Thomson published his “Castle of Indolence,” he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called obsolete words, of which not a few, as “carol,” “glee,” “imp,” “appall,” “blazon,” “sere,” are in good standing to-day. It is true, also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocabularies with words taken from the more archaic and obsolescent element of the language, and that we have in use many words that were more or less neglected during the eighteenth century. But in nearly all these cases it is probable that the vocables thus recalled to a living and working condition, were never actually dead, but only in a state of suspended animation.

It has been calculated that our English language, including the nomenclature of the arts and sciences, contains one hundred thousand words; yet of this immense number it is surprising how few are in common use. It is a common opinion that every Englishman and American speaks English, every German German, and every Frenchman French. The truth is, that each person speaks only that limited portion of the language with which he is acquainted. To the great majority even of educated men, three-fourths of these words are almost as unfamiliar as Greek or Choctaw. Strike from the lexicon all the obsolete or obsolescent words; all the words of special arts or professions; all the words confined in their usage to particular localities; all the words of recent coinage which have not yet been naturalized; all the words which even the educated speaker uses only in homœopathic doses,—and it is astonishing into what a manageable volume your plethoric Webster or Worcester will have shrunk. It has been calculated that a child uses only about one hundred words; and, unless he belongs to the educated classes, he will never employ more than three or four hundred. A distinguished American scholar estimates that few speakers or writers use as many as ten thousand words; ordinary persons, of fair intelligence, not over three or four thousand. Even the great orator, who is able to bring into the field, in the war of words, half the vast array of light and heavy troops which the vocabulary affords, yet contents himself with a far less imposing display of verbal force. Even the all-knowing Milton, whose wealth of words seems amazing, and whom Dr. Johnson charges with using a “Babylonish dialect,” uses only eight thousand; and Shakespeare himself, “the myriad-minded,” only fifteen thousand. Each word, however, has a variety of meanings, with more or fewer of which every man is familiar, so that his knowledge of the language, which has practically over a million of words, is far greater than it appears. Still the facts we have stated show that the difficulty of mastering the vocabulary of a new tongue is greatly overrated; and they show, too, how absurd is the boast of every new dictionary-maker that his vocabulary contains so many thousand words more than those of his predecessors. This may, or may not, be a merit; but it is certain that there is scarcely a page of Johnson that does not contain some word—obsolete, un-English, or purely scientific—that has no business there; while Webster and Worcester cram them in by hundreds and thousands at a time; each doing his best to load and deform his pages, and all the while triumphantly challenging the world to observe how prodigious an advantage he has gained over his rivals.

We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the meaning of words; but it is life that discloses to us their significance in all the vivid realities of experience. It is the actual world, with its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and pains, that reveals to us their joyous or terrible meanings—meanings not to be found in Worcester or Webster. Does the young and light-hearted maiden know the meaning of “sorrow,” or the youth just entering on a business career understand the significance of the words “failure” and “protest”? Go to the hod carrier, climbing the many-storied building under a July sun, for the meaning of “toil”; and, for a definition of “overwork,” go to the pale seamstress who

“In midnight’s chill and murk

Stitches her life into her work;

Bending backwards from her toil,

Lest her tears the silk might soil;

Shaping from her bitter thought

Heart’s-ease and forget-me-not;

Satirizing her despair

With the emblems woven there!”

Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, friends, and reputation,—with disease racking every limb,—for the definition of “remorse”; and go to the bedside of the invalid for the proper understanding of “health.” Life, with its inner experience, reveals to us the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our hearts the ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is a dictionary, and human experience the great lexicographer. Hundreds of human beings pass from their cradles to their graves who know not the force of the commonest terms; while to others their terrible significance comes home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the innermost fibres of their being.

To conclude,—it is one of the marvels of language, that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is capable, have been formed all the articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years, have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years, could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if each page should contain different orders of the twenty-four letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal organs are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the properties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can estimate the misery that man would experience were his sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would give him pain, loud talking or laughter stun him, and a peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead?

“If Nature thunder’d in his opening ears,

And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres,

How would he wish that Heaven had left him still

The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!”