ical constituents, so much lime, so much albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how his words. tell upon his adversary, battering down the intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with no mind to select and send them home to the mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? Scholars," says Sir Thomas Browne, are men of peace. They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen."

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The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. Analyze a speech by either of the great orators we have just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety

and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of thought. Attempt to substitute other words for those that are used, and you will find that the latter are part and parcel of the author's mind and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not the least of them can be changed without marring the completeness and beauty of the author's idea. If any other words can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet "you might as well think," says Coleridge, "of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakespeare." Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse.

In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; no words which are keynotes, awakening the spirit's melodies,

"Untwisting all the links that tie

The hidden soul of harmony."

But here is the realm of Milton's mastery. He electrifies the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion to their effect. "No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonyme for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying Open Wheat,' 'Open Barley,' to the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open Sesame.'

The force and significance which Milton can infuse into the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description of the largest of land animals, in "Paradise Lost." In a single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start aside. from fear of being crushed by the living mass:—

"Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved

His vastness."

It is this necromantic power over language,- this skill in striking "the electric chain with which we are darkly bound," till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the soul, which blinds us to the absurdities of Paradise Lost." While following this mighty magician of language through

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we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels fight with "villainous saltpetre" and divinities talk Cal

vinism, puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a As with Milton, so with his great predeWondrous as is his power of creating pic

school divine.

cessor, Dante.

tures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him "the invisible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window."

The difference in the use of words by different writers is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. Who that is familiar with Bacon's writings can ever fail to recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith; and going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient. instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave. "All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he had unguardedly provoked." Emerson, in speaking of the intense vitality of Montaigne's words, says that if you cut them, they would bleed. Joubert, in revealing the secret of Rousseau's charm, says: "He imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles à tous les mots), and poured into them such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that

his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our reason."

How much is the magic of Tennyson's verse due to "the fitting of aptest words to things," which we find on every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision, but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird influence,

"Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years," and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne's marvellous gift of melody, asks: "Who taught him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we did not know were in the language a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before, and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, and all words seem to be in his hands."

Words, with such men, are nimble and airy servitors,"