an extreme, it brought it into disrepute, and led men to cultivate again the native idiom.

In conclusion, to sum up our views of the matter, we would say to every young writer, give no fantastic preference to either Saxon or Latin, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings, for you can spare neither. The union of the two gives us an affluence of synonymes and a nicety of discrimination which no homogeneous tongue can boast. Never use a Romanic word when a Teutonic one will do as well; for the former carries a comparatively cold and conventional signification to an English ear. Between the sounding Latin and the homely, idiomatic Saxon, there is often as much difference in respect to a power of awakening associations, as between a gong and a peal of village bells. Pleasant though it be to read the pages of one who writes in a foreign tongue, as it is pleasant to visit distant lands, yet there is always the charm of home, with all its witchery, in the good old Anglo-Saxon of our fathers. Of the words that we heard in our childhood, there are some which have stored up in them an ineffable sweetness and flavor which make them precious ever after; there are others which are words of might, of power,-old, brawny, large-meaning words, heavily laden with associations, which, when they strike the imagination, awaken tender and tremulous memories, obscure, subtle, and yet most powerful. Our language is essentially Teutonic; the whole skeleton of it is thoroughly so; all its grammatical forms, all its most common and necessary words, are still identical with that old mother tongue whose varying forms lived on the lips of Arminius and of Hengest, of Harold of Norway, and of Harold of England, of Alaric, of Alboin, and of Charles the Great.

On the other hand, never scruple to use a Romanic word when the Saxon will not do as well; that is, do not overTeutonize from any archaic pedantry, but use the strongest, the most picturesque, or the most beautiful word, from whatever source it may come. The Latin words, though less home-like, must nevertheless be deemed as truly denizen in the language as the Saxon, as being no alien interlopers, but possessing the full right of citizenship. Perhaps of all our writers Shakspeare may be deemed in this matter the student's best friend. No one better knows how far the Saxon can go, or so often taxes its utmost resources; yet no one better knows its poverty and weakness; and, therefore, while in treating homely and familiar themes he uses simple words, and shows by his total abstinence from Latin words in some of his most beautiful passages, that he understands the monosyllabic music of our tongue, yet in his loftiest flights it is on the broad pinions of the Roman eagle that he soars, and, we shall find, if we regard him closely, that every feather belongs to its wing.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SECRET OF APT WORDS.

Le style c'est de l' homme.- BUFFON.

Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore, if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul. GOETHE.

So long as no words are uttered but in faithfulness, so long the art of language goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is shaped and chiselled on external principles, it falls into frivolity, and perishes... No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.- RUSKIN.

IT

T was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that language was given to man to conceal his thought. There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to be of the same opinion,-sham philosophers for the most part, who have an ambition to be original without the capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects. look larger in a fog, so their thoughts "loom up through the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence that is mistaken for sublimity." This style of writing is sometimes called "transcendental”; and if by this is meant that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these shallow-profound authors, "What a pity that So-and-so does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible English!" whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes

the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the clearest, and the chiaro-oscuro which these transcendentalists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intellectual nakedness, the convenient shelter for meagreness of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably indicates the shallow.

But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our ideas, as Talleyrand and Goldsmith before him supposed, there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, they have swept by him,- thoughts so swift and so many-hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some subject in one's study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer. Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expression, who was able to condense into one word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish

of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in

lines of splendid declamation:

"Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me - could I wreak

My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,

All that I would have sought, and all I seek,

Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe-into one word,
And that one word were lightning, I would speak;

But, as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."

So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:

"I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal,
And half conceal the soul within."

De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician's heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.

"The sea of thought is a boundless sea,

Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach;
The waves that would tell of the mystery
Die and fall on the shore of speech."

The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons who have conception without expression,gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such men they term men of passive genius." Their minds are like black glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them "the dumb ones of earth," for, like Zachariah, they have visions of high import, but are speechless when they would

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