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INDEX OF WORDS

ON THE STUDY OF WORDS

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

There are few who would not readily acknowledge that mainly in worthy books are preserved and hoarded the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the world has accumulated; and that chiefly by aid of books they are handed down from one generation to another. I shall urge on you in these lectures something different from this; namely, that not in books only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected oral discourse, but often also in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up--that from these, lessons of infinite worth may be derived, if only our attention is roused to their existence. I shall urge on you how well it will repay you to study the words which you are in the habit of using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual things, or our common words of the shop and the market, and of all the familiar intercourse of daily life. It will indeed repay you far better than you can easily believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young man his first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world; he is never able to cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side, and ever reveal themselves more and more to his gaze.

We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. And this is so, whether we are moving in the region of nature, which is the region of God's wonders, or in the region of art, which is the region of man's wonders; and nowhere truer than in this sphere and region of language, which is about to claim us now. Oftentimes here we walk up and down in the midst of intellectual and moral marvels with a vacant eye and a careless mind; even as some traveller passes unmoved over fields of fame, or through cities of ancient renown--unmoved, because utterly unconscious of the lofty deeds which there have been wrought, of the great hearts which spent themselves there. We, like him, wanting the knowledge and insight which would have served to kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes deprived of this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and miss no less that manifold instruction which ever lies about our path, and nowhere more largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims, 'lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on.'

And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer ought it to be in regard of our own, of our 'mother tongue,' as we affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us has borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study. 'In a language,' he says, 'like ours, where so many words are derived from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign.' So writes Coleridge; and impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language as 'fossil poetry.' He evidently means that just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their portion,--so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever. The phrase is a striking one; the only fault one can find with it is that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this 'fossil poetry'; but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense, as of the imagination or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion. On all these points I shall enter at full in after lectures; but I may give by anticipation a specimen or two of what I mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to all.

Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration of what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further, make a few observations on a subject, which, if we would go at all to the root of the matter, we can scarcely leave altogether untouched,--I mean the origin of language, in which however we will not entangle ourselves deeper than we need. There are, or rather there have been, two theories about this. One, and that which rather has been than now is, for few maintain it still, would put language on the same level with the various arts and inventions with which man has gradually adorned and enriched his life. It would make him by degrees to have invented it, just as he might have invented any of these, for himself; and from rude imperfect beginnings, the inarticulate cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression of natural objects upon him, little by little to have arrived at that wondrous organ of thought and feeling, which his language is often to him now.

And so far we may concede a limited amount of right to those who have held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of embodying thought in words. I believe that we should conceive the actual case most truly, if we conceived this power of naming things and expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being, one of the divine capabilities with which he was created: but one which could not remain dormant in him, for man could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud and blossom out from within him at every solicitation from the world without and from his fellow-man; as each object to be named appeared before his eyes, each relation of things to one another arose before his mind. It was not merely the possible, but the necessary, emanation of the spirit with which he had been endowed. Man makes his own language, but he makes it as the bee makes its cells, as the bird its nest; he cannot do otherwise.

Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive man, we should then find savage tribes, furnished scantily enough, it might be, with the elements of speech, yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings, its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus after a while have been wholly lost.

But while it is thus with him, while this is the downward course of all those that have chosen the downward path, while with every impoverishing and debasing of personal and national life there goes hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language; so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress, where a divine idea is in any measure realizing itself in a people, where they are learning more accurately to define and distinguish, more truly to know, where they are ruling, as men ought to rule, over nature, and compelling her to give up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. It cannot lag behind; for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that he has not secured any new thought, or entered upon any new spiritual inheritance, till he has fixed it in language, till he can contemplate it, not as himself, but as his word; he is conscious that he must express truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would propagate it among others. 'Names,' as it has been excellently said, 'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'

Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise, unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be lost again; for as has lately been well said: 'The success and enduring influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end. "Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the second, because it was not grasped and firmly held in the form and proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other minds, a fixed and scientific quantity.' And on the necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of truth it has been justly observed: 'Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.' And this holds good alike of the false and of the true. I think we may observe very often the way in which controversies, after long eddying backward and forward, hither and thither, concentrate themselves at last in some single word which is felt to contain all that the one party would affirm and the other would deny. After a desultory swaying of the battle hither and thither 'the high places of the field' the critical position, on the winning of which everything turns, is discovered at last. Thus the whole controversy of the Catholic Church with the Arians finally gathers itself up in a single word, 'homoousion;' that with the Nestorians in another, 'theotokos.' One might be bold to affirm that the entire secret of Buddhism is found in 'Nirvana'; for take away the word, and it is not too much to say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone. So too when the medieval Church allowed and then adopted the word 'transubstantiation' , it committed itself to a doctrine from which henceforward it was impossible to recede. The floating error had become a fixed one, and exercised a far mightier influence on the minds of all who received it, than except for this it would have ever done. It is sometimes not a word, but a phrase, which proves thus mighty in operation. 'Reformation in the head and in the members 'was the watchword, for more than a century before an actual Reformation came, of all who were conscious of the deeper needs of the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he called it 'the positive philosophy.'

We have been tempted to depart a little, though a very little, from the subject immediately before us. What was just now said of the manner in which language enriches itself does not contradict a prior assertion, that man starts with language as God's perfect gift, which he only impairs and forfeits by sloth and sin, according to the same law which holds good in respect of each other of the gifts of heaven. For it was not meant, as indeed was then observed, that men would possess words to set forth feelings which were not yet stirring in them, combinations which they had not yet made, objects which they had not yet seen, relations of which they were not yet conscious; but that up to man's needs, he would find utterance freely. The great logical, or grammatical, framework of language, he would possess, he knew not how; and certainly not as the final result of gradual acquisitions, and of reflexion setting these in order, and drawing general rules from them; but as that rather which alone had made those acquisitions possible; as that according to which he unconsciously worked, filled in this framework by degrees with these later acquisitions of thought, feeling, and experience, as one by one they arrayed themselves in the garment and vesture of words.

You must all have remarked the amusement and interest which children find in any notable agreement between a name and the person who owns that name, as, for instance, if Mr. Long is tall--or, which naturally takes a still stronger hold upon them, in any manifest contradiction between the name and the name-bearer; if Mr. Strongitharm is a weakling, or Mr. Black an albino: the former striking from a sense of fitness, the latter from one of incongruity. Nor is this a mere childish entertainment. It continues with us through life; and that its roots lie deep is attested by the earnest use which is often made, and that at the most earnest moments of men's lives, of such agreements or disagreements as these. Such use is not un-frequent in Scripture, though it is seldom possible to reproduce it in English, as for instance in the comment of Abigail on her husband Nabal's name: 'As his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him' . And again, 'Call me not Naomi,' exclaims the desolate widow-- 'call me not Naomi ; call me Marah , for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.' She cannot endure that the name she bears should so strangely contradict the thing she is. Shakespeare, in like manner, reveals his own profound knowledge of the human heart, when he makes old John of Gaunt, worn with long sickness, and now ready to depart, play with his name, and dwell upon the consent between it and his condition; so that when his royal nephew asks him, 'How is it with aged Gaunt?' he answers,

But more frequent still is this hostile use of names, this attempt to place them and their owners in the most intimate connexion, to make, so to speak, the man answerable for his name, where the name does not thus need to be reversed; but may be made as it now is, or with very slightest change, to contain a confession of the ignorance, worthlessness, or futility of the bearer. If it implies, or can be made to imply, anything bad, it is instantly laid hold of as expressing the very truth about him. You know the story of Helen of Greece, whom in two of his 'mighty lines' Marlowe's Faust so magnificently apostrophizes:

'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium?'

Where, on the other hand, it is desired to do a man honour, how gladly, in like manner, is his name seized on, if it in any way bears an honourable significance, or is capable of an honourable interpretation --men finding in that name a presage and prophecy of that which was actually in its bearer. A multitude of examples, many of them very beautiful, might be brought together in this kind. How often, for instance, and with what effect, the name of Stephen, the proto-martyr, that name signifying in Greek 'the Crown,' was taken as a prophetic intimation of the martyr-crown, which it should be given to him, the first in that noble army, to wear.

Irenaeus means in Greek 'the Peaceable'; and early Church writers love to remark how fitly the illustrious Bishop of Lyons bore this name, setting forward as he so earnestly did the peace of the Church, resolved as he was, so far as in him lay, to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The Dominicans were well pleased when their name was resolved into 'Domini canes'--the Lord's watchdogs; who, as such, allowed no heresy to appear without at once giving the alarm, and seeking to chase it away. When Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare's 'well-filed lines'--

--he is manifestly playing with his name. Fuller, too, our own Church historian, who played so often upon the names of others, has a play made upon his own in some commendatory verses prefixed to one of his books:

'Thy style is clear and white; thy very name Speaks pureness, and adds lustre to the frame.'

He plays himself upon it in an epigram which takes the form of a prayer:

'My soul is stain?d with a dusky colour: Let thy Son be the soap; I'll be the fuller.'

Let me observe, before leaving this subject, that not in one passage only, but in passages innumerable, Scripture sets its seal to this significance of names, to the fact that the seeking and the finding of this significance is not a mere play upon the surface of things: it everywhere recognizes the inner band, which ought to connect, and in a world of truth would connect, together the name and the person or thing bearing the name. Scripture sets its seal to this by the weight and solemnity which it everywhere attaches to the imposing of names; this in many instances not being left to hazard, but assumed by God as his own peculiar care. 'Thou shalt call his name Jesus' is of course the most illustrious instance of all; but there is a multitude of other cases in point; names given by God, as that of John to the Baptist; or changed by Him, as Abram's to Abraham , Sarai's to Sarah, Hoshea's to Joshua; or new names added by Him to the old, when by some mighty act of faith the man had been lifted out of his old life into a new; as Israel added to Jacob, and Peter to Simon, and Boanerges or Sons of thunder to the two sons of Zebedee . The same feeling is at work elsewhere. A Pope on his election always takes a new name. Or when it is intended to make, for good or for ill, an entire breach with the past, this is one of the means by which it is sought to effect as much . How far this custom reaches, how deep the roots which it casts, is exemplified well in the fact that the West Indian buccaneer makes a like change of name on entering that society of blood. It is in both cases a sort of token that old things have passed away, that all have become new to him.

And it is of course our English tongue, out of which mainly we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it contains, from which we should endeavour to remove the veil which custom and familiarity have thrown over it. We cannot employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help than will this to form an English heart in ourselves and in others. We could scarcely have a single lesson on the growth of our English tongue, we could scarcely follow up one of its significant words, without having unawares a lesson in English history as well, without not merely falling on some curious fact illustrative of our national life, but learning also how the great heart which is beating at the centre of that life was gradually shaped and moulded. We should thus grow too in our sense of connexion with the past, of gratitude and reverence to it; we should rate more highly and thus more truly all which it has bequeathed to us, all that it has made ready to our hands. It was not a small matter for the children of Israel, when they came into Canaan, to enter upon wells which they digged not, and vineyards which they had not planted, and houses which they had not built; but how much vaster a boon, how much more glorious a prerogative, for any one generation to enter upon the inheritance of a language which other generations by their truth and toil have made already a receptacle of choicest treasures, a storehouse of so much unconscious wisdom, a fit organ for expressing the subtlest distinctions, the tenderest sentiments, the largest thoughts, and the loftiest imaginations, which the heart of man has at any time conceived. And that those who have preceded us have gone far to accomplish this for us, I shall rejoice if I am able in any degree to make you feel in the lectures which will follow the present.

ON THE POETRY IN WORDS.

'Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, Until the chaff be purg?d from the wheat, Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear, The richness of the flour will scarce appear. So, till men's persons great afflictions touch, If worth be found, their worth is not so much, Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet That value which in threshing they may get. For till the bruising flails of God's corrections Have thresh?d out of us our vain affections; Till those corruptions which do misbecome us Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us; Until from us the straw of worldly treasures, Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures, Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay, To thresh the husk of this our flesh away; And leave the soul uncovered; nay, yet more, Till God shall make our very spirit poor, We shall not up to highest wealth aspire; But then we shall; and that is my desire.'

This deeper religious use of the word 'tribulation' was unknown to classical antiquity, belonging exclusively to the Christian writers; and the fact that the same deepening and elevating of the use of words recurs in a multitude of other, and many of them far more signal, instances, is one well deserving to be followed up. Nothing, I am persuaded, would more mightily convince us of the new power which Christianity proved in the world than to compare the meaning which so many words possessed before its rise, and the deeper meaning which they obtained, so soon as they were assumed as the vehicles of its life, the new thought and feeling enlarging, purifying, and ennobling the very words which they employed. This is a subject which I shall have occasion to touch on more than once in these lectures, but is itself well worthy of, as it would afford ample material for, a volume.

and again of 'Avernus' ; being indeed in this anticipated by Lucretius :

quia sunt avibus contraria cunctis.

Then again what poetry is there, as indeed there ought to be, in the names of flowers! I do not speak of those, the exquisite grace and beauty of whose names is so forced on us that we cannot miss it, such as 'Aaron's rod,' 'angel's eyes,' 'bloody warrior,' 'blue-bell, 'crown imperial,' 'cuckoo-flower,' blossoming as this orchis does when the cuckoo is first heard, 'eye- bright,' 'forget-me-not,' 'gilt-cup' , 'hearts-ease,' 'herb-of- grace,' 'Jacob's ladder,' 'king-cup,' 'lady's fingers,' 'Lady's smock,' 'Lady's tresses,' 'larkspur,' 'Lent lily,' 'loose-strife,' 'love-in- idleness,' 'Love lies bleeding,' 'maiden-blush,' 'maiden-hair,' 'meadow-sweet,' 'Our Lady's mantle,' 'Our Lady's slipper,' 'queen-of- the-meadows,' 'reine-marguerite,' 'rosemary,' 'snow-flake,' 'Solomon's seal,' 'star of Bethlehem,' 'sun-dew,' 'sweet Alison,' 'sweet Cicely,' 'sweet William,' 'Traveller's joy,' 'Venus' looking-glass,' 'Virgin's bower,' and the like; but take 'daisy'; surely this charming little English flower, which has stirred the peculiar affection of English poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth, and received the tribute of their song, becomes more charming yet, when we know, as Chaucer long ago has told us, that 'daisy' is day's eye, or in its early spelling 'daieseighe,' the eye of day; these are his words:

For only consider how much is implied here. To the sun in the heavens this name, eye of day, was naturally first given, and those who transferred the title to our little field flower meant no doubt to liken its inner yellow disk, or shield, to the great golden orb of the sun, and the white florets which encircle this disk to the rays which the sun spreads on all sides around him. What imagination was here, to suggest a comparison such as this, binding together as this does the smallest and the greatest! what a travelling of the poet's eye, with the power which is the privilege of that eye, from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, and of linking both together. So too, call up before your mind's eye the 'lavish gold' of the drooping laburnum when in flower, and you will recognize the poetry of the title, 'the golden rain,' which in German it bears. 'Celandine' does not so clearly tell its own tale; and it is only when you have followed up the , , of which 'celandin' is the English representative, that the word will yield up the poetry which is concealed in it.

Very curious is the determination which some words, indeed many, seem to manifest, that their poetry shall not die; or, if it dies in one form, that it shall revive in another. Thus if there is danger that, transferred from one language to another, they shall no longer speak to the imagination of men as they did of old, they will make to themselves a new life, they will acquire a new soul in the room of that which has ceased to quicken and inform them any more. Let me make clear what I mean by two or three examples. The Germans, knowing nothing of carbuncles, had naturally no word of their own for them; and when they first found it necessary to name them, as naturally borrowed the Latin 'carbunculus,' which originally had meant 'a little live coal,' to designate these precious stones of a fiery red. But 'carbunculus,' word full of poetry and life for Latin-speaking men, would have been only an arbitrary sign for as many as were ignorant of that language. What then did these, or what, rather, did the working genius of the language, do? It adopted, but, in adopting, modified slightly yet effectually the word, changing it into 'Karfunkel,' thus retaining the framework of the original, yet at the same time, inasmuch as 'funkeln' signifies 'to sparkle,' reproducing now in an entirely novel manner the image of the bright sparkling of the stone, for every knower of the German tongue. 'Margarita,' or pearl, belongs to the earliest group of Latin words adopted into English. The word, however, told nothing about itself to those who adopted it. But the pearl might be poetically contemplated as the sea-stone; and so our fathers presently transformed 'margarita' into 'mere-grot,' which means nothing less. Take another illustration of this from another quarter. The French 'rossignol,' a nightingale, is undoubtedly the Latin 'lusciniola,' the diminutive of 'luscinia,' with the alteration, so frequent in the Romance languages, of the commencing 'l' into 'r.' Whatever may be the etymology of 'luscinia,' it is plain that for Frenchmen in general the word would no longer suggest any meaning at all, hardly even for French scholars, after the serious transformations which it had undergone; while yet, at the same time, in the exquisitely musical 'rossignol,' and still more perhaps in the Italian 'usignuolo,' there is an evident intention and endeavour to express something of the music of the bird's song in the liquid melody of the imitative name which it bears; and thus to put a new soul into the word, in lieu of that other which had escaped. Or again--whatever may be the meaning of Senlac, the name of that field where the ever-memorable battle, now better known as the Battle of Hastings, was fought, it certainly was not 'Sanglac,' or Lake of Blood; the word only shaping itself into this significant form subsequently to the battle, and in consequence of it.

He did the same in another not very poetical region who invented the Latin law-term, 'stellionatus.' The word includes all such legally punishable acts of swindling or injurious fraud committed on the property of another as are not specified in any more precise enactment; being drawn and derived from a practice attributed, I suppose without any foundation, to the lizard or 'stellio' we spoke of just now. Having cast its winter skin, it is reported to swallow it at once, and this out of a malignant grudge lest any should profit by that which, if not now, was of old accounted a specific in certain diseases. The term was then transferred to any malicious wrong whatever done by one person to another.

In other regions it was only to be expected that we should find poetry. Thus it is nothing strange that architecture, which has been called frozen music, and which is poetry embodied in material forms, should have a language of its own, not dry nor hard, not of the mere intellect alone, but one in the forming of which it is evident that the imaginative faculties were at work. To take only one example--this, however, from Gothic art, which naturally yields the most remarkable-- what exquisite poetry in the name of 'the rose window' or better still, 'the rose,' given to the rich circular aperture of stained glass, with its leaf-like compartments, in the transepts of a Gothic cathedral! Here indeed we may note an exception from that which usually finds place; for usually art borrows beauty from nature, and very faintly, if at all, reflects back beauty upon her. In this present instance, however, art is so beautiful, has reached so glorious and perfect a development, that if the associations which the rose supplies lend to that window some hues of beauty and a glory which otherwise it would not have, the latter abundantly repays the obligation; and even the rose itself may become lovelier still, associated with those shapes of grace, those rich gorgeous tints, and all the religious symbolism of that in art which has borrowed and bears its name. After this it were little to note the imagination, although that was most real, which dictated the term 'flamboyant' to express the wavy flame-like outline, which, at a particular period of art, the tracery in the Gothic window assumed.

'Godsacre' or 'Godsfield,' is the German name for a burial-ground, and once was our own, though we unfortunately have nearly, if not quite, let it go. What a hope full of immortality does this little word proclaim! how rich is it in all the highest elements of poetry, and of poetry in its noblest alliance, that is, in its alliance with faith-- able as it is to cause all loathsome images of death and decay to disappear, not denying them, but suspending, losing, absorbing them in the sublimer thought of the victory over death, of that harvest of life which God shall one day so gloriously reap even there where now seems the very triumphing place of death. Many will not need to be reminded how fine a poem in Longfellow's hands unfolds itself out of this word.

Lastly let me note the pathos of poetry which lies often in the mere tracing of the succession of changes in meaning which certain words have undergone. Thus 'elend' in German, a beautiful word, now signifies wretchedness, but at first it signified exile or banishment. The sense of this separation from the native land and from all home delights, as being the woe of all woes, the crown of all sorrows, little by little so penetrated the word, that what at first expressed only one form of misery, has ended by signifying all. It is not a little notable, as showing the same feeling elsewhere at work, that 'essil' in old French signified, not only banishment, but ruin, destruction, misery. In the same manner meaning at first no more than having to do with a return, comes in the end to signify almost anything which is favourable and auspicious.

Let us then acknowledge man a born poet; if not every man himself a 'maker' yet every one able to rejoice in what others have made, adopting it freely, moving gladly in it as his own most congenial element and sphere. For indeed, as man does not live by bread alone, as little is he content to find in language merely the instrument which shall enable him to buy and sell and get gain, or otherwise make provision for the lower necessities of his animal life. He demands to find in it as well what shall stand in a real relation and correspondence to the higher faculties of his being, shall feed, nourish, and sustain these, shall stir him with images of beauty and suggestions of greatness. Neither here nor anywhere else could he become the mere utilitarian, even if he would. Despite his utmost efforts, were he so far at enmity with his own good as to put them forth, he could not succeed in exhausting his language of the poetical element with which it is penetrated through and through; he could not succeed in stripping it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this; but it will only need for him to become a little better philologer, to go a little deeper into the story of the words which he is using, and he will discover that he is as remote as ever from such an unhappy consummation, from so disastrous a success.

ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS.

Is man of a divine birth and of the stock of heaven? coming from God, and, when he fulfils the law of his being, and the intention of his creation, returning to Him again? We need no more than the words he speaks to prove it; so much is there in them which could never have existed on any other supposition. How else could all those words which testify of his relation to God, and of his consciousness of this relation, and which ground themselves thereon, have found their way into his language, being as that is the veritable transcript of his innermost life, the genuine utterance of the faith and hope which is in him? In what other way can we explain that vast and preponderating weight thrown into the scale of goodness and truth, which, despite of all in the other scale, we must thankfully acknowledge that his language never is without? How else shall we account for that sympathy with the right, that testimony against the wrong, which, despite of all aberrations and perversions, is yet the prevailing ground-tone of all?

Then further I would bid you to note the many words which men have dragged downward with themselves, and made more or less partakers of their own fall. Having once an honourable meaning, they have yet with the deterioration and degeneration of those that used them, or of those about whom they were used, deteriorated and degenerated too. How many, harmless once, have assumed a harmful as their secondary meaning; how many worthy have acquired an unworthy. Thus 'knave' meant once no more than lad ; 'villain' than peasant; a 'boor' was a farmer, a 'varlet' a serving-man, which meaning still survives in 'valet,' the other form of this word; a 'menial' was one of the household; a 'paramour' was a lover, an honourable one it might be; a 'leman' in like manner might be a lover, and be used of either sex in a good sense; a 'beldam' was a fair lady, and is used in this sense by Spenser; a 'minion' was a favourite ; a 'pedant' in the Italian from which we borrowed the word, and for a while too with ourselves, was simply a tutor; a 'proser' was one who wrote in prose; an 'adventurer' one who set before himself perilous, but very often noble ventures, what the Germans call a gl?cksritter; a 'swindler,' in the German from which we got it, one who entered into dangerous mercantile speculations, without implying that this was done with any intention to defraud others. Christ, according to Bishop Hall, was the 'ringleader' of our salvation. 'Time-server' two hundred years ago quite as often designated one in an honourable as in a dishonourable sense 'serving the time.' 'Conceits' had once nothing conceited in them. An 'officious' man was one prompt in offices of kindness, and not, as now, an uninvited meddler in things that concern him not; something indeed of the older meaning still survives in the diplomatic use of the word.

This same deterioration through use may be traced in the verb 'to resent.' Barrow could speak of the good man as a faithful 'resenter' and requiter of benefits, of the duty of testifying an affectionate 'resentment' of our obligations to God. But the memory of benefits fades from us so much more quickly than that of injuries; we remember and revolve in our minds so much more predominantly the wrongs, real or imaginary, men have done us, than the favours we owe them, that 'resentment' has come in our modern English to be confined exclusively to that deep reflective displeasure which men entertain against those that have done, or whom they fancy to have done, them a wrong. And this explains how it comes to pass that we do not speak of the 'retaliation' of benefits at all so often as the 'retaliation' of injuries. 'To retaliate' signifies no more than to render again as much as we have received; but this is so much seldomer practised in the matter of benefits than of wrongs, that 'retaliation' though not wholly strange in this worthier sense, has yet, when so employed, an unusual sound in our ears. 'To retaliate' kindnesses is a language which would not now be intelligible to all. 'Animosity' as originally employed in that later Latin which gave it birth, was spiritedness; men would speak of the 'animosity' or fiery courage of a horse. In our early English it meant nothing more; a divine of the seventeenth century speaks of 'due Christian animosity.' Activity and vigour are still implied in the word; but now only as displayed in enmity and hate. There is a Spanish proverb which says, 'One foe is too many; a hundred friends are too few.' The proverb and the course which this word 'animosity' has travelled may be made mutually to illustrate one another.

How mournful a witness for the hard and unrighteous judgments we habitually form of one another lies in the word 'prejudice.' It is itself absolutely neutral, meaning no more than a judgment formed beforehand; which judgment may be favourable, or may be otherwise. Yet so predominantly do we form harsh unfavourable judgments of others before knowledge and experience, that a 'prejudice' or judgment before knowledge and not grounded on evidence, is almost always taken in an ill sense; 'prejudicial' having actually acquired mischievous or injurious for its secondary meaning.

Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the attestations to God's truth, and then some of the playings into the hands of the devil's falsehood, which lurk in words. And first, the attestations to God's truth, the fallings in of our words with his unchangeable Word; for these, as the true uses of the word, while the other are only its abuses, have a prior claim to be considered.

It is worse, as marking that a still holier sanctuary than that of civil government has become profane in men's sight, when words which express sacred functions and offices become redolent of scorn. How thankful we may be that in England we have no equivalent to the German 'Pfaffe,' which, identical with 'papa' and 'pope,' and a name given at first to any priest, now carries with it the insinuation of almost every unworthiness in the forms of meanness, servility, and avarice which can render the priest's office and person base and contemptible.

Much may be learned by noting the words which nations have been obliged to borrow from other nations, as not having the same of home-growth-- this in most cases, if not in all, testifying that the thing itself was not native, but an exotic, transplanted, like the word that indicated it, from a foreign soil. Thus it is singularly characteristic of the social and political life of England, as distinguished from that of the other European nations, that to it alone the word 'club' belongs; France and Germany, having been alike unable to grow a word of their own, have borrowed ours. That England should have been the birthplace of 'club' is nothing wonderful; for these voluntary associations of men for the furthering of such social or political ends as are near to the hearts of the associates could have only had their rise under such favourable circumstances as ours. In no country where there was not extreme personal freedom could they have sprung up; and as little in any where men did not know how to use this freedom with moderation and self-restraint, could they long have been endured. It was comparatively easy to adopt the word; but the ill success of the 'club' itself everywhere save here where it is native, has shown that it was not so easy to transplant or, having transplanted, to acclimatize the thing. While we have lent this and other words, political and industrial for the most part, to the French and Germans, it would not be less instructive, if time allowed, to trace our corresponding obligations to them.

And scarcely less significant and instructive than the presence of a word in a language, will be occasionally its absence. Thus Fronto, a Greek orator in Roman times, finds evidence of an absence of strong family affection on the part of the Romans in the absence of any word in the Latin language corresponding to the Greek How curious, from the same point of view, are the conclusions which Cicero in his high Roman fashion draws from the absence of any word in the Greek answering to the Latin 'ineptus'; not from this concluding, as we might have anticipated, that the character designated by the word was wanting, but rather that the fault was so common, so universal with the Greeks, that they failed to recognize it as a fault at all. Very instructive you may find it to note these words, which one people possess, but to which others have nothing to correspond, so that they have no choice but to borrow these, or else to go without altogether. Here are some French words for which it would not be easy, nay, in most cases it would be impossible, to find exact equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language: 'aplomb,' 'badinage,' 'born?,' 'chic,' 'chicane,' 'cossu,' 'coterie,' '?garement,' '?lan,' 'espi?glerie,' 'etourderie,' 'friponnerie,' 'gentil,' 'ing?nue,' 'liaison,' 'malice,' 'parvenu,' 'persiflage,' 'pr?venant,' 'ruse,' 'tournure,' 'tracasserie,' 'verve.' It is evident that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody, there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have devised for themselves such words as the following: 'gem?th,' 'heimweh,' 'innigkeit,' 'sehnsucht,' 'tiefsinn,' 'sittsamkeit,' 'verh?ngniss,' 'weltschmerz,' 'zucht'; all these being German words which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their equivalents in French.

The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing 'habl?r' from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give it in 'h?bler' the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in exactly their own coin, for of 'parler' which in like manner is but to speak in French, they make 'parl?r,' which means to prate, to chat.

ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.

Language, being ever in flux and flow, and, for nations to which letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present; that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers itself for our investigation--'the pedigree of nations,' as Johnson calls it -- itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or other writing which employs it. The written records may have been falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.

Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German, Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to analyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what succession they followed, one upon the other.

Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this, in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now, when so many documents, so many institutions survive, this must still be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of large periods of our history.

Here is the explanation of the assertion made just now--namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception , descend to us from them--'sovereign,' 'sceptre,' 'throne,' 'realm,' 'royalty,' 'homage,' 'prince,' 'duke,' 'count,' , 'chancellor,' 'treasurer,' 'palace,' 'castle,' 'dome,' and a multitude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of 'king' would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to assert itself anew.

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