Page:2015.396258.Vyasavali.pdf/150

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138
ESSAYS

graphically explained by Walter Releigh in his Easy on Style.

"Fixity in the midist of change, fluctuation at the heart of sameness, such is the estate of language. According as they endeavour to reduce letters to some large haven and abiding-place of Civility or prefer to throw in their lot with the centrifugal tendency and ride on the flying crest of change, are writers dubbed Classic or Romantic. The Romantics are individualist, anarchic; the strains of their passionate incantation raise no cities to confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres and draw wild things captive to a voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their lives in the effort to attain to self-Expression. All means and modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or invent strange jargons. They furnish up old words or weld together new indifferently, that they may possess the machinary of their speech and not he possessed by it. They are at odds with the idiom of their country in that it serves the common need, and hunt it though all its metamorphoses to subject it to their private will. Heretics by profession, they are every where