continued apprehension of the metaphor; but vividness is a quality which is dearly bought at the expense of any degree of objective clearness, of dry and sober precision; and it can always be attained, when really wanted, by new figures, after old figures have become prosaic appellations. As we rise, too, in the scale of linguistic use, from that which is straightforward and unreflective to that which is elaborate, pregnant, artistic, etymological considerations in many cases rise in value, and constitute an important element in that suggestiveness which invests every word, giving it its delicacy of application, making it full of significance and dignity where another term, coarsely synonymous with it, would be tame and ineffective. A pregnant implication of etymologic meaning often adds strikingly to the force and impressiveness of an expression. Yet this is but one element among many, and its degree of consequence is, I am convinced, apt to be over-estimated. To recur once more to some of our former illustrations—while an allusion to the whiteness of soul signified in candid may touch and interest one whose classical education enables him to recognize and appreciate it, nothing but a joke or a conceit could well be extracted from the etymology of candidate; while apprehend affords possible ground for a use in which both the physical and intellectual meanings shall be clearly felt, the one enforcing the other, understand would lend itself to no such treatment. And most of our words are in the condition of candid, candidate, and understand; either, as in the case of the two last, the etymology is trivial or obscure, or, as in the case of the first, it is within reach only of the learned, and cannot aid the general speaker and hearer. On the whole, a word, both in its direct significance and in its suggestiveness, is just what our usage makes it. Hardly any two vocables that we employ are more instinct with deep meaning, more untranslatable into other tongues, than home and comfort; yet neither of them borrows aught from etymology; the one signifies by derivation nothing more intimate than the place where one lives, the other, than the conferral of strength (con-fortare); nor has either an etymon in English, discoverable without curious research. It is true that fatherly,
