We do not mean what is
technically called a living language,--the contrivance, hollow as a
speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds, even now, sailing
o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each other and make known
their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one that is still hot from
the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened yet, but moltenly ductile
to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new thought. So
soon as a language has become literary, so soon as there is a gap between
the speech of books and that of life, the language becomes, so far as
poetry is concerned, almost as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin
verses) a mind in itself essentially original becomes in the use of such
a medium of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar
and not solar, in expression and even in thought. For words and thoughts
have a much more intimate and genetic relation, one with the other, than
most men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue
as if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of an
overmastering vocabulary. "Ye know not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to
Learning, that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce
betwixt the Tongue and the Heart.
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