the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."[1] Hence the value of a book which is framed to remind us of this nobility of pedigree, and with the lofty sanctify the low, and, as it were, recal the baptismal time of these garment-soiled, time-stricken words, when the fresh dew of their morning-tide was upon them, and they were pledged to a vocation long since neglected or forgotten. Winged words deserve scrutiny in their flight. "On words," says Landor, "rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck ineradicably in a million hearts ….. On a winged word hath hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness."[2] Alluding to Emerson's expression, Mr. Trench happily observes that language may be, and indeed is, "fossil poetry"—but is also, and with equal truth, fossil ethics, or fossil history. He calls it the embodiment, the incarnation of the feelings, thoughts and experiences of a nation, often of many nations, and of all which through centuries they have attained to and won—standing like the pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these, and even itself a great element of that advance. He calls it the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. He reserves the dictum which pronounces words the wise man's counters and the fool's money; for in words he descries a reality, a living power, not merely an arbitrary symbolism; to his eye they are not like the sands of the sea, innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing out of roots, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of the world until now.
And thus he regards language as a moral barometer, which indicates and permanently marks the rise or fall of a nation's life. "To study a people's language will be to study them, and to study them at best advantage, where they present themselves to us under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are." It will bear the stamp of national frivolity, shallowness and triviality, or of high sentiment and superiority to everything mean and base. And though it may be lost labour to seek for the parentage of all words, yet all have an ancestry, or descent of some kind. "There is no word which is not, as the Spanish gentleman loves to call himself, an hidalgo, the son of somebody"—so that, when a word entirely refuses[3] to give up the secret of its origin, it can be regarded in no other light but as a riddle which no one has succeeded in solving, a lock of which no one has found the key—but still a riddle which has a solution, a lock for which there is a key, though now, it may be, irrecoverably lost
- ↑ Emerson's Essays. Second Series. ("The Poet.")
- ↑ Imaginary Conversations (Lucian and Timotheus).
- ↑ Among words which are but of yesterday, and yet with a marvellous rapidity have forgotten the circumstances of their origin, Mr. Trench refers to the terms, Roundheads, Cannibal, Huguonots, Canada, and a word which the Anglo-Americans might be supposed quite able to explain, since it plays so prominent a part in their elections,—viz. Caucus.
