And may benign heaven deliver us from those buckram individuals who imagine that Nature is as narrow and rigid as their own contracted selves, and who would seek to array her in their own exquisite bottle-green bifurcations and a gilet à la mode! These characters always put us in mind of the statues of Louis XIV, in which he is represented as Jupiter or Hercules, nude, with the exception of the lion's hide thrown round him—and the long, flowing peruke of the times! O Jupiter tonans! let us have either the lion or the ass—only let it be veracious!
To proceed: 'Auburn' is probably connected with brennan, and means sun-burned, analogous, indeed, to 'Ethiopian' (Ἁθἱοψ), one whom the sun has looked upon.
How seldom do we think, in uttering 'adieu,' that we verily say, I commend you à Dieu—to God; that the lightly-spoken good-by means God be wi' you,[3] or that the (if possible) still more frequent and unthinking 'thank you,' in reality assures the person addressed—I will think often of you.
'Eld' is a word that has the poetic aroma about it, and is an example (of which we might adduce additional cases from the domain of 'poetic diction') of a word set aside from a prose use and devoted exclusively to poetry. It is, as we know, Saxon, signifying old or old age, and was formerly in constant use in this sense; as, for instance, in Chaucer's translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophiæ, we find thus:
'At laste no drede ne might overcame tho muses, that thei ne weren fellowes, and foloweden my waie, that is to saie, when I was exiled, thei that weren of my youth whilom welfull and grene, comforten now sorrowfull weirdes of me olde man: for elde is comen unwarely upon me, hasted by the harmes that I have, and sorowe hath commaunded his age to be in me.'
So in the Knightes Tale:
'As sooth in said elde hath gret avantage;
In elde is both wisdom and usage:
Men may the old out-renne but not out-rede.'
Oh! what an overflowing fulness of truth and beauty is there wrapped up in the core of these articulations that we so heedlessly utter, would we but make use of the wizard's wand wherewith to evoke them! What an exhaustless wealth does there lie in even the humblest fruitage and flowerage of language, and what a fecundity have even dry 'roots'!
'Thinkest thou there were no poets till Dan Chaucer?' asks our great Thomas; 'no heart burning with a thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word for—what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor, and bold questionable originality. 'Thy very ATTENTION, does it not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO?' Fancy that act of the mind which all were conscious of, which none had yet named—when this new 'poet' first felt bound and driven to name it! His questionable originality and new glowing metaphor was found adoptible, intelligible; and remains our name for it to this day.'[4]
This seems to be a pet etymology of Carlyle, as he makes Professor Teufelsdröckh give it to us also.