mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to all.

Language then is 'fossil poetry'; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now: perhaps through the help of this very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man. was in his degree a poet-a maker, that is, of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word ɛiλipivýs, which signified originally 'the winnowed, the unmingled,' gave first its ethical signification of sincere,' 'truthful,' or as we might say, 'unadulterated,' can we deny

to him the poet's feeling and eye?*

Many

a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them 'sierras' or 'saws,' the name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but that man coined his imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named.

But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great moral truths-God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language, that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know, asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop Butler turns the word 'pastime'; how solemn the testimony which he compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against itselfobliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and satisfying joy† they are only 'pastime'; they serve only,

* See Trench's Synonyms N.T. § lxxxv.

6

Sermon xiv. Upon the Love of God. Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same testimony out of the word: This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and passing away the time, represents the custom of those wise sort of people, who think they cannot have a better account of their lives, than to let them

as this word confesses, to pass away the time, to prevent it from hanging, an intolerable burden, on men's hands: all which they can do at the best is to prevent men from discovering and attending to their own internal poverty and dissatisfaction and want. He might have added that there is the same acknowledgment in the word 'diversion,' which means no more than that which diverts or turns us aside from ourselves, and in this way helps us to forget ourselves for a little. And thus it would appear that, even according to the world's own confession, all which it proposes is not to make us happy, but a little to prevent us from remembering that we are unhappy, to pass away our time, to divert us from ourselves. While, on the other hand, we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy them to the uttermost, is not in us, but without us and above us, in the words which we use to set forth any transcending delight. Take three or four of these words 'transport,' 'rapture,' 'ravishment,' ' ecstasy,'-' transport,' that which carries us, as 'rapture,' or 'ravishment,' that which snatches us out of and above our

run out and slide away, to pass them over and to baulk them, and as much as they can, to take no notice of them and to shun them, as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality. But I know it to be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious even in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it, and nature has delivered it into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we commonly complain of ourselves, if it be troublesome to us or slide unprofitably away.'

selves; and 'ecstasy' is very nearly the same, only drawn from the Greek.

And not less, where a perversion of the moral sense has found place, words preserve oftentimes a record of this perversion. We have a signal example of this in the use, or rather misuse, of the words 'religion' and 'religious' during the Middle Ages, and indeed in many parts of Christendom still. A 'religious' person did not then mean any one who felt and owned the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellowmen, but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, the member of a monastic Order, of a 'religion 'as it was called. As little did a 'religious' house then mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man. What a light does this one word so used throw on the entire state of mind and habits of thought in those ages! That then was 'religion,' and alone deserved the name! And ' religious' was a title which might not be given to parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women fulfilling faithfully and holily in the world the duties of their several stations, but only to those who had devised a self-chosen service for themselves.*

* A reviewer in Fraser's Magazine, Dec. 1851, doubts whether I have not here pushed my assertion too far. So far from this, it was not merely the 'popular language' which this corruption had invaded, but a decree of the

But language is fossil history as well. What a record of great social revolutions, revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations, the one word 'frank' contains, which is used, as we all know, to express aught that is generous, straightforward, and free. The Franks, I need not remind you, were a powerful German tribe, or association of tribes, who gave themselves * this proud name of the 'franks' or the free; and who, at the breaking up of the Roman Empire, possessed themselves of Gaul, to which they gave their own name. They were the ruling conquering people, honourably distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of freedom, their scorn of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name 'frank' indicated not

great Fourth Lateran Council (A.D. 1215), forbidding the further multiplication of monastic Orders, runs thus: Ne nimia religionum diversitas gravem in Ecclesiâ Dei confusionern inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de cetero novam religionem inveniat, sed quicunque voluerit ad religionem converti, unam de approbatis assumat. [For the use of the word 'religion' in the New Testament (A.V.) see Trench, Synonyms N.T. § xlviii.]

* [This explanation of the name Franks is now generally given up. The name is probably a derivative from a lost O.H.G. *francho, a spear or javelin: compare O.E. franca, Icel. frakka; similarly the Saxons are supposed to have derived their name from a weapon—seax, a knife; see Kluge's Dict. (s.v. frank).]