[XIII.]
LANGUAGE OF DIVINE ORIGIN.
One of our greatest poets says,
"'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo of the sense."
The words buzz, crackle, crash, blow, rattle, roar, hiss, whistle, and many others of a like nature and construction, were evidently formed to imitate the sounds themselves. Sometimes the word expressing an object is formed to imitate the sound produced by that object, as waye, cuckoo, whippoorwill, whisper, hum. I have been thus particular in calling the attention of the reader to these beautiful characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon because it is the language of the Cat in so far as word-signs are used in it for want of action to express the ideas or as conjunctives more particularly. The smooth and liquid passages from your poets, which express onomatopoeia, are but echoes from that most beautiful of all languages, that of the Cat. Such are the word-signs of Goldsmith,
"The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnished clock that clicked behind the door."
To the credit of the Cat language it must be said that, while it is esteemed a great beauty in writing and conversation, as well as speaking, when the word-signs selected for the expression of an idea convey, by their sound, some resemblance to the subject which they express, the Cat language contains none but such words. You will remember the most wonderful poem written in the English language, and notice the word-painting in the following extract from "Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard,"
"For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind!"
Pope, also, in his "Essay on Criticism," in a manner though different yet scarcely less expressive, gives a verbal representation of his idea, by the selection of his terms in the following:
"These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire,
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."