“Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to be found?”
“Fudge!”
How full of pathos is the “Alack, alack!” of Jeanie Deans at the supreme moment in her sister’s trial; and how forcibly “Oho!” expresses exasperating self-felicitation at the discovery of a carefully guarded secret! What volumes of meaning are sometimes condensed into the little word “psha”! “Doubt,” says Thackeray, “is always crying ‘psha,’ and sneering.” How expressive are those almost infinitesimal words which epitomize the alternations of human life, “ah!” and “ha!” As Fuller beautifully moralizes: “‘Ha!’ is the interjection of laughter; ‘ah!’ is an interjection of sorrow. The difference between them is very small, as consisting only in the transposition of what is no substantial letter, but a bare aspiration. How quickly, in the age of a minute, in the very turning of our breath, is our mirth changed to mourning!”
“Nature in many tones complains,
Has many sounds to tell her pains;
But for her joys has only three,
And those but small ones, Ha! ha! he!”
The truth is that, so far is this class of words from being, as Max Müller contends, the mere outskirts of language, they are more truly words than any others. These little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic isles,—these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to all lips, and are understood by all men,—these “silver fragments of a broken voice,” to use an expression of Tennyson’s, “the only remains of the Eden lexicon in the dictionaries of all races,”—
“The only words
Of Paradise that have survived the fall,”—