"She was sent forth

To bring that light which never wintry blast
Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes -
The light that shines from loving eyes upon
Eyes that love back, till they can see no more."

Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly all the rest are monosyllables.

Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the "Philosophy of Style," has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words or of parts of words. "Formerly," says an able writer, "when armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier's eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all languages as they become more refined; and so far are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia;

and the most rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt words,-yardlongtailed, like fiends."

We have already spoken of Johnson's fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, whatever the theme upon which he was writing; and also of certain speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal contempt for small words, and never use one when they can find a pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is evident, however, from the passages we have cited, that these Liliputians,—these Tom Thumbs of the dictionary,play as important a part in our literature as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. Like the infusoria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known to have raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the great family of words. In some kinds of writing their almost exclusive use is indispensable. What would have been the fate of Bunyan's immortal book had he told the story of the Pilgrim's journey in the ponderous, elephantine "osities" and "ations" of Johnson, or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that the author of the "Rambler," in spite of his sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “lies like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame." When we remember that the Saxon language, the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, more than five hundred, by the vowel e, some four hundred and fifty; by

the vowel i, about four hundred; by the vowel o, over four hundred; and by the vowel u, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated as "creepers," are of high importance, and that to know when and how to use them is of no less moment to the speaker or writer than to know when to use the grandiloquent expressions which we have borrowed from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or pen, we would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,themselves a happy example of the thing he commends:

"Think not that strength lies in the big round word,
Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak,

To whom can this be true who once has heard
The cry for help, the tongue that all men speak,
When want or woe or fear is in the throat,

So that each word gasped out is like a shriek
Pressed from the sore heart, or a strange wild note
Sung by some fay or fiend. There is a strength
Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine,

Which has more height than breadth, more depth than length.
Let but this force of thought and speech be mine,

And he that will may take the sleek, fat phrase,

Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and shine,-
Light, but no heat a flash, but not a blaze!
Nor is it mere strength that the short word boasts;
It serves of more than fight or storm to tell.
The roar of waves that clash on rock-bound coasts,
The crash of tall trees when the wild winds swell,
The roar of guns, the groans of men that diè

On blood-stained fields. It has a voice as well

For them that far off on their sick-beds lie;

For them that weep, for them that mourn the dead;
For them that laugh, and dance, and clap the hand;
To joy's quick step, as well as grief's slow tread,
The sweet, plain words we learned at first keep time,
And, though the theme be sad, or gay, or grand,
With each. with all, these may be made to chime,

In thought, or speech, or song, in prose or rhyme."

CHAPTER V.

WORDS WITHOUT MEANING.

POLONIUS. What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET. Words, words, words.-SHAKSPEARE.

Is not cant the materia prima of the Devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves; from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself properly a double-distilled lie; the second power of a lie.- CARLYLE.

That virtue of originality that men so strain after is not newness, as they vainly think (there is nothing new), it is only genuineness; it all depends on this single glorious faculty of getting to the spring of things, and working out from that; it is the coolness and clearness and deliciousness of the water fresh from the fountain-head, opposed to the thick, hot, unrefreshing drainage from other men's meadows.- RUSKIN.

OME years ago the author of the "Biographical His

SOM

tory of Philosophy," in a criticism of a certain public performer in London, observed that one of his most marked qualities was the priceless one of frankness. "He accepts no sham. He pretends to admire nothing he does not in his soul admire. He pretends to be nothing that he is not. Beethoven bores him, and he says so: how many are as wearied as he, but dare not confess it! Oh, if men would but recognize the virtue of intrepidity! If men would but cease lying in traditionary formulas,— pretending to admire, pretending to believe, and all in sheer respectability!"

Who does not admire the quality here commended, and yet what quality, in this age of self-assertion, of sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, is more rare? What an amount of insincerity there is in human speech! In how

few persons is the tongue an index to the heart!

What a meaningless conventionality pervades all the forms of social intercourse! Everybody knows that Everybody knows that "How d'ye do?" and " Good morning!" are parroted in most cases without a thought of their meaning, or, at least, without any positive interest in the health or prosperity of the person addressed; we begin a letter to one whom we secretly detest with "My dear sir," and at the end subscribe ourselves his "obedient servant," though we should resent a single word from him which implied a belief in our sincerity, or bore the slightest appearance of a command. But not to dwell upon these phrases, the hollowness of which may be excused on the ground that they sweeten human intercourse, and prevent the roughest men from degenerating into absolute boors, it is yet startling to reflect how large a proportion of human speech is the veriest cant. That men should use words the meaning of which they have never weighed or discriminated, is bad enough; but that they should habitually use words as mere counters or forms, is certainly worse. There is hardly a class, a society, or a relation in which man can be placed toward man, that does not call into play more or less of language without meaning. The damnable iteration" of the lawyer in a declaration of assault and battery is not more a thing of form than is the asseveration of one petitioner that he "will ever pray," etc., and of another that he "will be a thousand times obliged," if you will grant his request. Who does not know to what an amount of flummery the most trifling kindness done by one person to another often gives occasion on both sides? The one racks the vocabulary for words and phrases in which to express his pretended grat

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