instead of primus we were to pronounce it primis (is being long, and us short).

It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement of words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer’s own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is “the ordered march of his lordly prose” that is the secret of Macaulay’s charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume’s periods which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.

It has been truly said by a brilliant New England writer that this mystery of style,—why it is, that when one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,—has never been sounded. “One can understand a little how the wink or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,—who has fathomed yet this wonder?”

From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans of the day than this,—that the study is useless, because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle’s version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth’s Cicero, Morris’s Virgil, Martin’s Horace, or Carter’s Epictetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of many, upon Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” All this seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,—the exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,—are precisely those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations of them are no more like the original than a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a writer,—the life and spirit,—all that is idiomatic, peculiar, or characteristic,—all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in Horace,—evaporates in a translation.

It is true that, judging by dictionaries only, almost every word in one language has equivalents in every other; but a critical study of language shows that, with the exception of terms denoting sensible objects and acts, there is rarely a precise coincidence in meaning between any two words in different tongues. Compare any two languages, and you will find that there are, as the mathematicians would say, many incommensurable quantities, many words in each untranslatable into the other, and that it is often impossible, by a paraphrase, to supply an equivalent. To use De Quincey’s happy image from the language of eclipses, the correspondence between the disk of the original word and its translated representative, is, in thousands of instances, not annular; the centres do not coincide; the words overlap. Even words denoting sensible objects are not always exact equivalents in any two languages. It might be supposed that a berg (the German for mountain or hill) was a berg all the world over, and that a word signifying this tangible object in one language must be the absolute equivalent of the word expressing it in another. Yet, as a late German writer[1] has said, this is far from being the case. The English “mountain,” for instance, refers to something bigger than the German berg. On the other hand, “hill,” which has the next lower signification, in its many meanings is far too diminutive for the German term, which finds no exact rendering in any English vocable.

A comparison of the best English versions of the New Testament with the original, strikingly shows the inadequacy of the happiest translations. Even in the Revised Version, upon which an enormous amount of labor was expended by the best scholars in England and the United States, many niceties of expression which mark the original fail to appear. Owing to the poverty of our tongue compared with the Greek, which, it has been said, can draw a clear line where other languages can only make a blot, the translators have been compelled to use the same English word for different Greek ones, and thus obliterate many fine distinctions which are essential to the meaning. Thus, as one of the Revisers has shown, it is impossible to exhibit in English the delicate shades of difference in meaning which appear in the Greek between the two verbs both rendered “love,”[2] in John xxi, 15-17. “The word first employed by Christ is a very common one in the New Testament, and specially denotes a pure, spiritual affection. It is used of God’s love to man, as in John iii, 16—‘God so loved the world,’ etc.—and of man’s love to God, as in Matt. xxii, 37—‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,’ etc. The other word more particularly implies that warmth of feeling which exists between friends. Thus, it is used respecting Lazarus in John xi, 3: ‘Behold, he whom thou lovest is sick;’ and again, in John xx, 2, of St. John himself, when he is spoken of as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Now, the use of the one word at first by Christ serves to remind St. Peter of the claim which his Divine Master had upon his deep, reverential love. But the Apostle, now profoundly sensible of his own weakness, does not venture to promise this, yet, feeling his whole heart flowing out to Christ, he makes use of the other word, and assures the Saviour at least of a fervent personal affection. Christ then repeats His question, still using the same verb, and Peter replies as before. But on asking the question for the third time, Christ graciously adopts the term employed by the Apostle: He speaks to him again as a friend; He clasps the now happy disciple afresh to His own loving heart.”[3] Now all this is lost through the comparative meagreness of our language. To what extent the subtle distinctions of the Greek original are and must be lost in the translation, may be guessed from the fact that there are no fewer than ten Greek words which have been rendered “appoint” in the ordinary version, no fewer than fourteen which stand for “give,” and no fewer than twenty-one which correspond to “depart.”

Above all does poetry defy translation. It is too subtle an essence to be poured from one vessel into another without loss. Of Cicero’s elegant and copious rhetoric, of the sententious wisdom of Tacitus, of the keen philosophic penetration and masterly narrative talent of Thucydides, of the thunderous eloquence of Demosthenes, and even of Martial’s jokes, it may be possible to give some inkling through an English medium; but of the beauties and splendors of the Greek and Latin poets,—never. As soon will another Homer appear on earth, as a translator echo the marvellous music of his lyre. Imitations of the “Iliad,” more or less accurate, may be given, or another poem may be substituted in its place; but a perfect transfusion into English is impossible. For, as Goethe somewhere says, Art depends on Form, and you cannot preserve the form in altering the form. Language is a strangely suggestive medium, and it is through the reflex and vague operation of words upon the mind that the translator finds himself baffled. Words, as Cowper said of books, “are not seldom talismans and spells.” They have, especially in poetry, a potency of association, a kind of necromantic power, aside from their significance as representative signs. Over and above their meanings as given in the dictionary, they connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by their employment for hundreds of years. There are in every language certain magical words, which, though they can be translated into other tongues, yet are hallowed by older memories, or awaken tenderer and more delightful associations, than the corresponding words in those tongues. Such words in English are gentleman, comfort, and home, about each of which cluster a multitude of associations which are not suggested by any foreign words by which they can be rendered. There is in poetry a mingling of sound and sense, a delicacy of shades of meaning, and a power of awakening associations, to which the instinct of the poet is the key, and which cannot be passed into a foreign language if the meaning be also preserved. You may as easily make lace ruffles out of hemp. Language, it cannot be too often repeated, is not the dress of thought; it is its living expression, and controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters.

How many abortive attempts have been made to translate the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” into English verse! What havoc have even Pope and Cowper made of some of the grandest passages in the old bard! The former, it has been well said, turned his lines into a series of brilliant epigrams, sparkling and cold as the “Heroic Epistles” of Ovid; the other chilled the warmth and toned down the colors of Homer into a sober, drab-tinted hue, through which gods and men loom feebly, and the camp of the Achæans, the synod of the Trojans, and the deities in council, have much of the air of a Quaker meeting-house. Regarded as an English poem, Pope’s translation of the “Iliad” is unquestionably a brilliant and exquisitely versified production; but viewed as a transfusion of the old bard into another language, it is but a caput mortuum, containing but little more of Homer than the names and events. The fervid and romantic tone, the patriarchal simplicity, the mythologic coloring, the unspeakable audacity and freshness of the images,—all that breathes of an earlier world, and of the sunny shores, and laughing waves, and blue sky, of the old Ægean,—all this, as a critic has observed, “is vanished and obliterated, as is the very swell and fall of the versification, regular in its very irregularity, like the roll of the ocean. Instead of the burning, picture-like words of the old Greek, we have the dainty diction of a literary artist; instead of the ever varied, resounding swell of the hexameter, the neat, elegant, nicely balanced modern couplet. In short, the old bard is stripped of his flowing chlamys and his fillets, and is imprisoned in the high-heeled shoes, the laced velvet coat, and flowing periwig of the eighteenth century.” Chapman, who has more of the spirit of Homer, occasionally catches a note or two from the Ionian trumpet; but presently blows so discordant a blast that it would have grated on the ear of Stentor himself. Lord Derby and William C. Bryant have been more successful in many respects than Pope or Cowper; but each has gained some advantages by compensating defects.

Did Dryden succeed better when he put the “Æneid” into verse? Did he give us that for which Virgil toiled during eleven long years? Did he give us the embodiment of those vulgar impressions which, when the old Latin was read, made the Roman soldier shiver in all his manly limbs? All persons who are familiar with English literature know what havoc Dryden made of “Paradise Lost,” when he attempted, even in the same language, to put it into rhyme,—a proposal to do which drew from Milton the contemptuous remark: “Ay, young man; you can tag my rhymes.” A man of genius never made a more signal failure. He could not draw the bow of Ulysses. His rhyming, rhetorical manner, splendid and powerful as it confessedly is, proved an utterly inadequate vehicle for the high argument of the great Puritan. So with his modernizations of Chaucer. His reproductions of “the first finder of our faire language” contain much admirable verse; but it is not Chaucer’s. They are simply elaborate paraphrases, in which the idiomatic colors and forms, the distinctive beauties of the old poet,—above all, the simplicity and sly grace of his language, the exquisite tone of naïveté, which, like the lispings of infancy, give such a charm to his verse,—utterly vanish. Dryden failed, not from lack of genius, but simply because failure was inevitable,—because this aroma of antiquity, in the process of transfusion into modern language, is sure to evaporate.

All such changes involve a loss of some subtle trait of expression, or some complexional peculiarity, essential to the truthful exhibition of the original. The outline, the story, the bones remain; but the soul is gone,—the essence, the ethereal light, the perfume is vanished. As well might a painter hope, by using a different kind of tint, to give the expression of one of Raphael’s or Titian’s masterpieces, as any man expect, by any other words than those which a great poet has used, to convey the same meaning. Even the humblest writer has an idiosyncrasy, a manner of his own, without which the identity and truth of his work are lost. If, then, the meaning and spirit of a poem cannot be transferred from one place to another, so to speak, under the roof of a common language, must it not a fortiori be impossible to transport them faithfully across the barriers which divide one language from another, and antiquity from modern times?

How many ineffectual attempts have been made to translate Horace into English and French! It is easy to give the right meaning, or something like the meaning, of his lyrics; but they are cast in a mould of such exquisite delicacy that their ease and elegance defy imitation. All experience shows that the traduttore must necessarily be tradittore,—the translator, a traducer of the Sabine bard. As well might you put a violet into a crucible, and expect to reproduce its beauty and perfume, as expect to reproduce in another tongue the mysterious synthesis of sound and sense, of meaning and suggested association, which constitutes the vital beauty of a lyric. The special imagination of the poet, it has been well said, is an imagination inseparably bound up with language; possessed by the infinite beauty and the deepest, subtlest meanings of words; skilled in their finest sympathies; powerful to make them yield a meaning which another never could have extracted from them. It is of the very essence of the poet’s art, so that, in the highest exercise of that art, there is no such thing as the rendering of an idea in appropriate language; but the conception, and the words in which it is conveyed, are a simultaneous creation, and the idea springs forth full-grown, in its panoply of radiant utterance.

The works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, exist in the words as the mind in conjunction with the body. Separation is death. Alter the melody ever so skilfully, and you change the effect. You cannot translate a sound; you cannot give an elegant version of a melody. Prose, indeed, suffers less from paraphrase than poetry; but even in translating a prose work, unless one containing facts or reasoning merely, the most skilful linguist can be sure of hardly more than of transferring the raw material of the original sentiment into his own tongue. The bullion may be there, but its shape is altered; the flower is preserved, but the aroma is gone; there, to be sure, is the arras, with its Gobelin figures, but it is the wrong side out. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is as much contrast between the best translation and the original of a great author, as between a wintry landscape, with its dead grass and withered foliage, and the same landscape arrayed in the green robes of summer. Nay, we prefer the humblest original painting to a feeble copy of a great picture,—a barely “good” original book to any lifeless translation. A living dog is better than a dead lion; for the external attributes of the latter are nothing without the spirit that makes them terrible.

The difficulty of translating from a dead language, of whose onomatopœia we are ignorant, will appear still more clearly, when we consider what gross and ludicrous blunders are made in translating even from one living language into another. Few English-speaking persons can understand the audacity of Racine, so highly applauded by the French, in introducing the words chien and sel into poetry; “dog” and “salt” may be used by us without danger; but, on the other hand, we may not talk of “entrails” in the way the French do. Every one has heard of the Frenchman, who translated the majestic exclamation of Milton’s Satan, “Hail! horrors, hail!” by “Comment vous portez-vous, Messieurs les Horreurs, comment vous portez-vous?” “How do you do, horrors, how do you do?” Another Frenchman, in reproducing the following passage from Shakespeare in his own tongue,

translated the italicized words thus: “So, grief, be off with you!” In the opera of “Macbetto,” the term “hell-broth” in the witches’ scene is rendered in Italian polto inferno. Hardly less ridiculous is the blunder made by a translator of Alexander Smith’s “Life-Drama,” who metamorphoses the expression, “clothes me with kingdoms,” into “me fait un vêtement de royaumes,”—“makes me a garment of kingdoms.” Even so careful a writer as Lord Mahon, in his “History of the War of the Succession in Spain,” translates the French word abbé by “abbot.” One of the chief difficulties in translating into a foreign language is that, though every word the translator uses may be authorized by the best writers, yet the combination of his terms may be unidiomatic. Thus the words arène and rive are both to be found in the best French writers; yet if a foreigner, not familiar with the niceties of that language, should write

he would be laughed at, not only by the critics, but by the most illiterate workmen in Paris. The French idiom will not admit of the expression sur la rive du fleuve, correct though each word may be taken singly, but requires the phrase sur le bord de la rivière, as it does amasser du sable, and not amasser de l’arène. What can be more expressive than one of the lines in which Milton describes the lost angels crowding into Pandemonium, where, he says, the air was

a line which it is impossible to translate into words that will convey precisely the same emotions and suggestions that are roused by a perusal of the original? Suppose the translator to hit so near to the original as to write

will not the line affect you altogether differently? Let one translate into another language the following line of Shakespeare,

and is it at all likely that the quaint, comic effect of the words we have italicized would be reproduced?

The inadequacy of translations will be more strikingly exemplified by comparing the following lines of Shakespeare with such a version as we might expect in another language:

A foreign translator, says Leigh Hunt, would dilute and take all taste and freshness out of this draught of poetry, after some such fashion as the following:

In view of all these considerations what can be more untrue than the statement so often made, that to be capable of easy translation is a test of the excellence of a composition? This doctrine, it has been well observed, goes upon the assumption that one language is just like another language,—that every language has all the ideas, turns of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associations, abstractions, points of view which every other language has. “Now, as far as regards Science, it is true that all languages are pretty much alike for the purposes of Science; but even in this respect some are more suitable than others, which have to coin words or to borrow them, in order to express scientific ideas. But if languages are not all equally adapted even to furnish symbols for those universal and eternal truths in which Science consists, how can they be reasonably expected to be all equally rich, equally forcible, equally musical, equally exact, equally happy, in expressing the idiosyncratic peculiarities of thought of some original and fertile mind, who has availed himself of one of them? * * *

“It seems that a really great author must admit of translation, and that we have a test of his excellence when he reads to advantage in a foreign language as well as in his own. Then Shakespeare is a genius because he can be translated into German, and not a genius because he cannot be translated into French. The multiplication table is the most gifted of all conceivable compositions, because it loses nothing by translation, and can hardly be said to belong to any one language whatever. Whereas I should rather have conceived that, in proportion as ideas are novel and recondite, they would be difficult to put into words, and that the very fact of their having insinuated themselves into one language would diminish the chance of that happy accident being repeated in another. In the language of savages you can hardly express any idea or act of the intellect at all. Is the tongue of the Hottentot or Esquimau to be made the measure of the genius of Plato, Pindar, Tacitus, St. Jerome, Dante, or Cervantes?”[4]

The truth is, music written for one instrument cannot be played upon another. To the most cunning writer that ever tried to translate the beauties of an author into a foreign tongue, we may say in the language of a French critic: “You are that ignorant musician who plays his part exactly, not skipping a single note, nor neglecting a rest,—only what is written in the key of fa, he plays in the key of sol. Faithful translator!”

When we think of the marvellous moral influence which words have exercised in all ages, we cannot wonder that the ancients believed there was a subtle sorcery in them, “a certain bewitchery or fascination,” indicating that language is of mystic origin. The Jews, believing that God had revealed a full-grown language to mankind, attached a divine character to language, and supposed that there was a natural and necessary connection between words and things. The name of a person was not a mere conventional sign, but an essential attribute, an integral part of the person himself. Hence we find in Genesis no less than fifty derivations of names, in almost all of which the derivation connects the name, prophetically or otherwise, with some event in the person’s life. Hence, also, the practice, under certain conditions, of changing men’s names, as illustrated in the histories of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joshua and others. “Call me not Naomi (pleasant), but Mara (bitter),” said the broken-hearted widow of Elimelech. “Even in the New Testament we find our Lord Himself in a solemn moment fixing on the mind of His greatest apostle a new and solemn significance given to the name he bore. ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church.’ St. Paul also, is probably playing upon a name when, in Phil. iv, 3, he affectionately addresses a friend as γνήσιε Σύζυγε, ‘true yoke fellow,’ since it is an ancient and very probable supposition that Syzygus or Yokefellow is there a proper name.” The Gothic nations supposed that even their mysterious alphabetical characters, called “Runes,” possessed magical powers; that they could stop a sailing vessel or a flying arrow,—that they could excite love or hate, or even raise the dead. The Greeks believed that there was a necessary, mysterious connection between words and the objects they signified, so that man unconsciously expressed, in the words whereby he named things or persons, their innermost being and future destiny, as though in a symbol incomprehensible to himself. The accidental good omen in the name of an envoy who was called Hegesistratos, or “leader of an army,” decided a Greek general to assist the Samians, and led to the battle of Mycale. The Romans, in their levies, took care to enrol first names of good omen, such as Victor, Valerius, Salvius, Felix, and Faustus. Cæsar gave a command in Spain to an obscure Scipio, merely for the omen which his name involved. When an expedition had been planned under the leadership of Atrius Niger, the soldiers absolutely refused to proceed under a commander of so ill-omened a name,—dux abominandi nominis,—it being, as De Quincey says, “a pleonasm of darkness.” The same deep conviction that words are powers is seen in the favete linguis and bona verba quæso of the Romans, by which they endeavored to repress the utterance of any word suggestive of ill fortune, lest the event so suggested to the imagination should actually occur. So they were careful to avoid, by euphemisms, the utterance of any word directly expressive of death or other calamity, saying vixit instead of mortuus est, and “be the event fortunate or otherwise,” instead of “adverse.” The name Egesta they changed into Segesta, Maleventum into Beneventum, Axeinos into Euxine, and Epidamnus into Dyrrhachium, to escape the perils of a word suggestive of damnum, or detriment. Even in later times the same feeling has prevailed,—an illustration of which we have in the life of Pope Adrian VI, who, when elected, dared not retain his own name, as he wished, because he was told by his cardinals that every Pope who had done so had died in the first year of his reign.[5]

That there is a secret instinct which leads even the most illiterate peoples to recognize the potency of words, is illustrated by the use made of names in the East, in “the black art.” In the Island of Java, a fearful influence, it is said, attaches to names, and it is believed that demons, invoked in the name of a living individual, can be made to appear. One of the magic arts practised there is to write a man’s name on a skull, a bone, a shroud, a bier, an image made of paste, and then put it in a place where two roads meet, when a fearful enchantment, it is believed, will be wrought against the person whose name is so inscribed.

But we need not go to antiquity or to barbarous nations to learn the mystic power of words. There is not a day, hardly an hour of our lives, which does not furnish examples of their ominous force. Mr. Maurice says with truth, that “a light flashes out of a word sometimes which frightens one. It is a common word; one wonders how one has dared to use it so frequently and so carelessly, when there were such meanings hidden in it.” Shakespeare makes one of his characters say of another, “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs”; and there are, indeed, words which are sharper than drawn swords, which give more pain than a score of blows; and, again, there are words by which pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief removed, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, and courage infused. How often has a word of recognition to the struggling confirmed a sublime yet undecided purpose,—a word of sympathy opened a new vista to the desolate, that let in a prospect of heaven,—a word of truth fired a man of action to do a deed which has saved a nation or a cause,—or a genius to write words which have gone ringing down the ages!

A late writer has truly said that “there may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter; there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.”

“Nothing,” says Hawthorne, “is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind so distinctly that no utterance could make it more so; and two minds may be conscious of the same thought, in which one or both take the profoundest interest; but as long as it remains unspoken, their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea, as a rivulet may sparkle and dimple over something sunken in its bed. But speak the word, and it is like bringing up a drowned body out of the deepest pool of the rivulet, which has been aware of the horrible secret all along, in spite of its smiling surface.”

The significance of words is illustrated by nothing, perhaps, more strikingly than by the fact that unity of speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, government, or interests; and nations of one speech, though separated by broad oceans, and by creeds yet more widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling. Prof. Marsh has well observed that the fine patriotic effusion of Arndt, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” was founded upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of aims, and of duties; and the universal acceptance with which the song was received showed that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. When a nation is conquered by another, which would hold it in subjection, it has to be again conquered, especially if its character is essentially opposed to that of its conqueror, and the second conquest is often the more difficult of the two. To kill it effectually, its nationality must be killed, and this can be done only by killing its language; for it is through its language that its national prejudices, its loves and hates, and passions live. When this is not done, the old language, slowly dying out,—if, indeed, it dies at all,—has time to convey the national traditions into the new language, thus perpetuating the enmities that keep the two nations asunder. We see this illustrated in the Irish language, which, with all the ideas and feelings of which that language is the representative and the vehicle, has been permitted by the English government to die a lingering death of seven or eight centuries. The coexistence of two languages in a state is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of townships and counties in our country by distinct bodies of foreigners is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of our foreign population.

The languages of conquered peoples, like the serfs of the middle ages, appear to be glebæ adscriptitiæ, and to extirpate them, except by extirpating the native race itself, is an almost impossible task. Rome, though she conquered Greece, could not plant her language there. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire adopted the languages of their new subjects; the Avars and Slavs who settled in Greece became Hellenized in language; the Northmen in France adopted a Romanic tongue; and the Germans in France and northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, conformed to the speech of the tribes they had vanquished. It is asserted, on not very good authority, that William the Conqueror fatigued his ear and exhausted his patience, during the first years of his sovereignty, in trying to learn the Saxon language; but, failing, ordered the Saxons to speak Norman-French. He might as well have ordered his new subjects to walk on their heads. Charles the Fifth, in all the plenitude of his power, could not have compelled all his subjects, Dutch, Flemish, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., to learn his language; he had to learn theirs, though a score in number, as had Charlemagne before him.

England has maintained her dominion in the East for more than a hundred and fifty years, yet the mass of Hindoos know no more of her language than of the Greek. In the last century, Joseph II, of Austria, issued an edict that all his subjects, German, Slavonic, or Magyar, should speak and write one language,—German; but the people recked his decree as little as did the sea that of Canute. Many of the provinces broke out into open rebellion; and the project was finally abandoned. The Venetians were for a long period under the Austrian yoke; but they spoke as pure Italian as did any of their independent countrymen, and they never detested their rulers more heartily than at the time of their deliverance. The strongest bond of union between the different States of this country is not the wisdom of our constitution, nor the geographical unity of our territory, but the one common language that is spoken throughout the Republic, from the great lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Were different tongues spoken in the different sections of the realm, no wisdom of political structure or sagacity of political administration could hold so many States together amidst such diversities of culture and social customs, and interests so conflicting. But our unity of speech,—the common language in which we express our thoughts and feelings, making all friendly and commercial correspondence easy, giving us a common literature, and enabling us to read the same books, newspapers, printed lectures and speeches,—this is like a soul animating all the limbs of the Republic, giving it a firmer unity than its geological skeleton or its political muscles could possibly ensure. Were the languages of our country as various as those of Europe, who does not see that the task of allaying the bitter feeling of hostility at the South, which led to the late outbreak, and of fusing the citizens of the North and of the South into one homogeneous people, would be almost hopeless?

As a corollary from all that has been said, it is plain that nothing tends more to make a man just toward other nations than the exploration through their languages of their peculiar thought-world. He who masters the speech of a foreign people will gain therefrom a profound knowledge of their modes of thought and feeling, more accurate in some respects than he could gain by personal intercourse with them. He will feel the pulse of their national life in their dictionary, and will detect in their phraseology many a noble and manly impulse, of which, while blinded by national prejudice, he had never dreamed.

A volume might be filled with illustrations of the power of words; but, great as is their power, and though, when nicely chosen, they have an intrinsic force, it is, after all, the man who makes them potent. As it was not the famous needle gun, destructive as it is, which won the late Prussian victories, but the intelligence and discipline of the Prussian soldier,—the man behind the gun, educated in the best common schools in the world,—so it is the latent heat of character, the man behind the words, that gives them momentum and projectile force. The same words, coming from one person, are as the idle wind that kisses the cheeks; coming from another, they are the cannon shot that pierces the target in the bull’s-eye. The thing said is the same in each case; the enormous difference lies in the man who says it. The man fills out, crowds his words with meaning, and sends them out to do a giant’s work; or he makes them void and nugatory, impotent to reach their destination, or to do any execution should they hit the mark. The weight and value of opinions and sentiments depend oftentimes less upon their intrinsic worth than upon the degree in which they have been organized into the nature of the person who utters them; their force, less upon their inherent power than upon the latent heat stored away in their formation, which is liberated in their publication.

There is in character a force which is felt as deeply, and which is as irresistible, as the mightiest physical force, and which makes the plainest expressions of some men like consuming fire. Their words, instead of being the barren signs of abstract ideas, are the media through which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They inspire, as well as inform; electrify, as well as enlighten. Even truisms from their lips have the effect of original perceptions; and old saws and proverbs, worn to shreds by constant repetition, startle the ear like brilliant fancies. Some of the greatest effects recorded in the history of eloquence have been produced by words which, when read, strike us as tame and commonplace. The tradition that Whitefield could thrill an audience by saying “Mesopotamia!” probably only burlesques an actual fact.

Grattan said of the eloquence of Charles James Fox that “every sentence came rolling like a wave of the Atlantic, three thousand miles long.” Willis says that every word of Webster weighs a pound. College sophomores, newly fledged lawyers, and representatives from Bunkumville, often display more fluency than the New Hampshire giant; but his words are to theirs as the roll of thunder to the patter of rain. What makes his argument so ponderous and destructive to his opponents, is not its own weight alone, but in a great degree the added weight of his temper and constitution, the trip-hammer momentum with which he makes it fall upon the theory he means to crush. Even the vast mass of the man helped, too, to make his words impressive. “He carried men’s minds, and overwhelmingly pressed his thought upon them, with the immense current of his physical energy.” When the great champion of New England said, in the United States Senate, “There are Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever,” it was the weight of character, and of all the associations connected with it, which changed that which, uttered by another, would have been the merest truism, into a lofty and memorable sentiment. The majesty of the utterance, which is said to have quickened the pulse even of “the great Nullifier,” Calhoun, is due to the fact that it came from a mighty nature, which had weighed and felt all the meaning which those three spots represent in the stormy history of the world. It was this which gave such prodigious power to the words of Chatham, and made them smite his adversaries like an electric battery. It was the haughty assumption of superiority, the scowl of his imperial brow, the ominous growl of his voice, “like thunder heard remote,” the impending lightnings which seemed ready to dart from his eyes, and, above all, the evidence which these furnished of an imperious and overwhelming will, that abashed the proudest peers in the House of Lords, and made his words perform the office of stabs and blows. The same words, issuing from other lips, would have been as harmless as pop-guns.

In reading the quotations from Chalmers, which are reported to have so overwhelmingly oppressed those who heard them, almost every one is disappointed. It is the creative individuality projected into the words that makes the entire difference between Kean or Kemble and the poorest stroller that murders Shakespeare. It is said that Macready never produced a more thrilling effect than by the simple words, “Who said that?” An acute American writer observes that when Sir Edward Coke, a man essentially commonplace in his intellect and prejudices, though of vast acquirement and giant force of character, calls Sir Walter Raleigh “a spider of hell,” the metaphor may not seem remarkable; but it has a terrible significance when we see the whole roused might of Sir Edward Coke glaring through it.[6] What can be more effective than the speech of Thersites in the first book of the “Iliad”? Yet the only effect was to bring down upon the speaker’s shoulders the staff of Ulysses. Pope well observes that, had Ulysses made the same speech, the troops would have sailed for Greece that very night. The world considers not merely what is said, but who speaks, and whence he says it.

says the same poet of a servile race; and another poet says of a preacher who illustrated his doctrine by his life, that

Euripides expresses the same belief in the efficacy of position and character, when he makes Hecuba entreat Ulysses to intercede for her; “for the arguments,” says she, “which are uttered by men of repute, are very different in strength from those uttered by men unknown.”

The significance of the simplest epithet depends upon the character of the man that uses it. Let two men of different education, tastes, and habits of thought, utter the word “grand,” and our sense of the word is modified according to our knowledge of the men. The conceptions represented by the words a man uses, it is evident, are different from every other man’s; and into this difference enter all his individuality of character, the depth or the shallowness of his knowledge, the quality of his education, the strength or feebleness of his feelings, everything that distinguishes him from another man.

Mr. Whipple says truly that “there are no more simple words than ‘green,’ ‘sweetness,’ and ‘rest,’ yet what depth and intensity of significance shine in Chaucer’s ‘green’; what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates ‘sweetness,’ as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards; what celestial repose beams from ‘rest’ as it lies on the page of Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the resources of language; yet they are expressed in common words, transfigured, sanctified, imparadised by the spiritual vitality which streams through them.” The same critic, in speaking of style as the measure of a writer’s power, observes that “the marvel of Shakespeare’s diction is its immense suggestiveness,—his power of radiating through new verbal combinations, or through single expressions, a life and meaning which they do not retain in their removal to dictionaries. When the thought is so subtle, or the emotion so evanescent, or the imagination so remote, that it cannot be flashed upon the ‘inward eye,’ it is hinted to the inward ear by some exquisite variation of tone. An American essayist on Shakespeare, Mr. Emerson, in speaking of the impossibility of acting or reciting his plays, refers to this magical suggestiveness in a sentence almost as remarkable as the thing it describes. ‘The recitation,’ he says, ‘begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes!’ He who has not felt this witchery in Shakespeare’s style has never read him. He may have looked at the words, but has never looked into them.”

The fact that words are never taken absolutely,—that they are expressions, not simply of thoughts or feelings, but of natures,—that they are media for the emission and transpiration of character,—is one that cannot be too deeply pondered by young speakers and writers. Fluent young men who wonder that the words which they utter with such glibness and emphasis have so little weight with their hearers, should ask themselves whether their characters are such as to give weight to their words. As in engineering it is a rule that a cannon should be at least one hundred times heavier than its shot, so a man’s character should be a hundred times heavier than what he says. When a La Place or a Humboldt talks of the “universe,” the word has quite another meaning than when it is used by plain John Smith, whose ideas have never extended beyond the town of Hull. So, when a man’s friend gives him religious advice, and talks of “the solemn responsibilities of life,” it makes a vast difference in the weight of the words whether they come from one who has been tried and proved in the world’s fiery furnace, and whose whole life has been a trip-hammer to drive home what he says, or from a callow youth who prates of that which he feels not, and testifies to things which are not realities to his own consciousness. There is a hollow ring in the words of the cleverest man who talks of “trials and tribulations” which he has never felt. “Words,” says the learned Selden, “must be fitted to a man’s mouth. ’Twas well said by the fellow that was to make a speech for my lord mayor, that he desired first to take measure of his lordship’s mouth.”

Few things are more interesting in the study of a language, than to note how much it gains by time and culture. In its vocabulary, its forms, and its euphonic and other changes, it embodies the mental growth and modifications of thousands of minds. It enriches itself with all the intellectual spoils of the people that use it, and with the lapse of years is gradually deepened, mellowed, and refined. The language of an old and highly civilized people differs from that of its infancy, as much as a broad and majestic river, bearing upon its bosom the commerce of the world, differs from the tiny streamlet in which it had its origin. And yet it is no less true that, as Max Müller has observed, since the beginning of the world no new addition has ever been made to the substantial elements of speech, any more than to the substantial elements of nature. There is a constant change in language, a coming and going of words; but no man can ever invent an entirely new word. Before a novel term can be introduced into use, there must be some connection with a former term,—a bridge to enable the mind to pass over to the new word. Equally true is it that when a vocable has dropped out of the language,—has become dead or obsolete,—it is almost as impossible to call it back to life as it is to restore to life a deceased human being. Pope, it is true, speaks of commanding “old words that have long slept to wake;” and Horace declares that many words will be born again that have seemingly dropped into their graves. But it is certain that, as Prof. Craik says, “very little revivification has ever taken place in human speech,” and that one may more easily introduce into a language a dozen new words than restore to general use an old one that has been discarded. It is true that when Thomson published his “Castle of Indolence,” he prefixed to the poem a list of so-called obsolete words, of which not a few, as “carol,” “glee,” “imp,” “appall,” “blazon,” “sere,” are in good standing to-day. It is true, also, that in the first quarter of this century Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Scott, and other poets, enriched their vocabularies with words taken from the more archaic and obsolescent element of the language, and that we have in use many words that were more or less neglected during the eighteenth century. But in nearly all these cases it is probable that the vocables thus recalled to a living and working condition, were never actually dead, but only in a state of suspended animation.

It has been calculated that our English language, including the nomenclature of the arts and sciences, contains one hundred thousand words; yet of this immense number it is surprising how few are in common use. It is a common opinion that every Englishman and American speaks English, every German German, and every Frenchman French. The truth is, that each person speaks only that limited portion of the language with which he is acquainted. To the great majority even of educated men, three-fourths of these words are almost as unfamiliar as Greek or Choctaw. Strike from the lexicon all the obsolete or obsolescent words; all the words of special arts or professions; all the words confined in their usage to particular localities; all the words of recent coinage which have not yet been naturalized; all the words which even the educated speaker uses only in homœopathic doses,—and it is astonishing into what a manageable volume your plethoric Webster or Worcester will have shrunk. It has been calculated that a child uses only about one hundred words; and, unless he belongs to the educated classes, he will never employ more than three or four hundred. A distinguished American scholar estimates that few speakers or writers use as many as ten thousand words; ordinary persons, of fair intelligence, not over three or four thousand. Even the great orator, who is able to bring into the field, in the war of words, half the vast array of light and heavy troops which the vocabulary affords, yet contents himself with a far less imposing display of verbal force. Even the all-knowing Milton, whose wealth of words seems amazing, and whom Dr. Johnson charges with using a “Babylonish dialect,” uses only eight thousand; and Shakespeare himself, “the myriad-minded,” only fifteen thousand. Each word, however, has a variety of meanings, with more or fewer of which every man is familiar, so that his knowledge of the language, which has practically over a million of words, is far greater than it appears. Still the facts we have stated show that the difficulty of mastering the vocabulary of a new tongue is greatly overrated; and they show, too, how absurd is the boast of every new dictionary-maker that his vocabulary contains so many thousand words more than those of his predecessors. This may, or may not, be a merit; but it is certain that there is scarcely a page of Johnson that does not contain some word—obsolete, un-English, or purely scientific—that has no business there; while Webster and Worcester cram them in by hundreds and thousands at a time; each doing his best to load and deform his pages, and all the while triumphantly challenging the world to observe how prodigious an advantage he has gained over his rivals.

We are accustomed to go to the dictionary for the meaning of words; but it is life that discloses to us their significance in all the vivid realities of experience. It is the actual world, with its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and pains, that reveals to us their joyous or terrible meanings—meanings not to be found in Worcester or Webster. Does the young and light-hearted maiden know the meaning of “sorrow,” or the youth just entering on a business career understand the significance of the words “failure” and “protest”? Go to the hod carrier, climbing the many-storied building under a July sun, for the meaning of “toil”; and, for a definition of “overwork,” go to the pale seamstress who