“And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the vale,”—
the words “tells his tale” do not mean that he is romancing or making love to the milkmaid, but that he is counting his sheep as they pass the hawthorn,—a natural and familiar occupation of shepherds on a summer’s morning. The primary meaning of “tale” is to count or number, as in the German zahlen. It is thus used in the Book of Exodus, which states that the Israelites were compelled to deliver their “tale of bricks.” In the English “tale” and in the French conte the secondary meaning has supplanted the first, though we still speak of “keeping tally,” of “untold gold,” and say, “Here is the sum twice-told.”
Again, Milton’s use of the word “jolly” in the following lines from his “Sonnet to the Nightingale,” strikingly illustrates the disadvantages under which poetry in a living, and consequently ever-changing, language, labors:
“Thou with fresh hope the lover’s heart doth fill,
While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.”
Though we may know the meaning which the word bore a little more than two and a half centuries ago, yet it is impossible entirely to banish from the mind the vulgar associations which have gathered round it since.
It has been said that one of the arts of a great poet or prose-writer, who wishes to add emphasis to his style,—to bring out all the latent forces of his native tongue,—will often consist in reconnecting a word with its original derivation, in not suffering it to forget itself and its father’s house, though it would. This Milton does sometimes with signal effect; but in the great majority of cases his meaning becomes obscure to the unlearned reader. In a great number of cases we must interpret his words rather by their classical meanings than by their English use. Thus in “Paradise Lost,” when Satan speaks of his having been pursued by “Heaven’s afflicting thunder,” the poet uses the word “afflicting” in its original primary sense of striking down bodily. Properly the word denotes a state of mind or feeling only, and is not used to-day in a concrete sense. So when Milton, at the opening of the same poem, speaks of
“The secret top
Of Oreb or of Sinai,”