“In midnight’s chill and murk
Stitches her life into her work;
Bending backwards from her toil,
Lest her tears the silk might soil;
Shaping from her bitter thought
Heart’s-ease and forget-me-not;
Satirizing her despair
With the emblems woven there!”
Ask the hoary-headed debauchee, bankrupt in purse, friends, and reputation,—with disease racking every limb,—for the definition of “remorse”; and go to the bedside of the invalid for the proper understanding of “health.” Life, with its inner experience, reveals to us the tremendous force of words, and writes upon our hearts the ineffaceable records of their meanings. Man is a dictionary, and human experience the great lexicographer. Hundreds of human beings pass from their cradles to their graves who know not the force of the commonest terms; while to others their terrible significance comes home like an electric flash, and sends a thrill to the innermost fibres of their being.
To conclude,—it is one of the marvels of language, that out of the twenty plain elementary sounds of which the human voice is capable, have been formed all the articulate voices which, for six thousand or more years, have sufficed to express all the sentiments of the human race. Few as are these sounds, it has been calculated that one thousand million writers, in one thousand million years, could not write out all the combinations of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, if each writer were daily to write out forty pages of them, and if each page should contain different orders of the twenty-four letters. Another remarkable fact is that the vocal organs are so constructed as to be exactly adapted to the properties of the atmosphere which conveys their sounds, while at the same time the organs of hearing are fitted to receive with pleasure the sounds conveyed. Who can estimate the misery that man would experience were his sense of hearing so acute that the faintest whisper would give him pain, loud talking or laughter stun him, and a peal of thunder strike him deaf or dead?
“If Nature thunder’d in his opening ears,
And stunn’d him with the music of the spheres,
How would he wish that Heaven had left him still
The whispering zephyr and the purling rill!”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Karl Hildebrand.
[2] ἀγαπάω and φιλέω.
[3] “Companion to the Revised Version of the English New Testament,” by Alexander Roberts, D.D.
[4] “University Sermons,” by J. H. Newman.
[5] We have heard of an Englishman’s deploring with the deepest pathos his having been named “James,” asserting that it had to some extent made a flunkey of his very soul, against his will.
[6] “Literature and Life,” by Edwin P. Whipple.