as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes to-morrow part and parcel of the proper substance, the breast, leg, or arm,—of an Illinois farmer.

In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make foreigners "stare and gasp," and are ridiculed by our own philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the nobleness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent · to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous in Greek than in Latin,—in French or Italian than in Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained him who soared "above all Greek, above all Roman fame"; and the same "well of English undefiled" did not fail the myriad-minded dramatist, when

"Each scene of many colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."

Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the full. It has "combinations of sound grander than ever rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the

plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff." To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George Herbert:

"Let foreign nations of their language boast,

What fine variety each tongue affords;

I like our language, as our men and coast:-
Who cannot dress it well, want wIT, not WORDS."..

CHAPTER IV.

SMALL WORDS.

It is with words as with sunbeams,-the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.-SOUTHEY.

Language is like the minim immortal among the infusoria, which keeps splitting itself into halves.-COLERIDGE.

MONG the various forms of ingratitude, one of the

AMONG

commonest is that of kicking down the ladder by which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music of our tongue, sneers at them as low:

"While feeble expletives their aid do join,

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

"How ingenious! how felicitous!" the reader exclaims; and, truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing the Saxon part of the language with words borrowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twickenham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English. literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of passages in his works, in which the small words form not only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of such a line as that quoted. "Small words," he elsewhere

says,

"are generally stiff and languishing, but they may be beautiful to express melancholy." It is the old story of

66 -the ladder >

Whereto the climber upward turns his face,

But when he once attains the utmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend."

The truth is, the words most potent in life and literature, in the mart, in the senate, in the forum, and at the fireside, are small words, the monosyllables which the half-educated speaker and writer despises. All passionate expression,-the outpouring of the soul when moved to its depths,- is, for the most part, in monosyllables. They are the heart-beats, the very throbs of the brain, made visible by utterance. The will makes its giant victory strokes in little monosyllables, deciding for the right and against the wrong. In the hour of fierce temptation, at the ballot-box, in the court-room, in all the crises of life, how potent for good or evil are the little monosyllables, "Yes" and "No"! "Yes' is the Olympian nod of approval which fills heaven with ambrosia and light; 'no' is the stamp of Jupiter which shakes heaven and darkens the faces of the gods. 'Yes' how it trembles from the maiden's lips, the broken utterance, the keysyllable of a divine song which her heart only sings; how it echoes in the ecstatic pulses of the doubtful lover, and makes Paradise open its gates for the royal entry of the triumphing conqueror, Love. 'No,'-well might Miles Standish say that he could not stand fire if 'No' should come 'point-blank from the mouth of a woman'; what 'captain, colonel or knight-at-arms' could? 'No': 'tis the impregnable fortress,-the very Malakoff of the will; it

is the breastwork and barrier thrown up, which the charge must be fierce indeed to batter down or overleap. It is the grand and guarded tower against temptation; it is the fierce and sudden arrow through all the rings, that dismays the suitors of the dear and long-cherished and faithful Penelope, and makes the unforgotten king start from the disguise of a beggar."

Again, there is a whole class of words, and those among the most expressive in the language, of which the great majority are monosyllables. We refer to the interjections. We are aware that some philologists deny that interjections are language. Horne Tooke sneers at this whole class of words as "brutish and inarticulate," as "the miserable refuge of the speechless," and complains that, "because beautiful and gaudy," they have been suffered to usurp a place among words. "Where will you look for it" (the interjection), he triumphantly asks; will you find it among laws, or in books of civil institutions, in history, or in any treatise of useful arts or sciences ? No: you must seek for it in rhetoric and poetry, in novels, plays and romances." This acute writer has forgotten one book in which interjections abound, and awaken in the mind emotions of the highest grandeur and pathos,-namely, the Bible. But the use of this

66

part of speech is not confined to books. It is heard wherever men interchange thought and feeling, whether on the gravest or the most. trivial themes; in tones of the tenderest love and of the deadliest hate; in shouts of joy and ecstasies of rapture, and in the expression of deep anguish, remorse and despair; in short, in the outburst of every human feeling. More than this, not only is it heard in daily life, but we are told by the highest