rent garment of the Church to those necessary "dissections made in
the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built."
Words may safely veer to every wind that blows, so they keep within
hail of their cardinal meanings, and drift not beyond the scope of
their central employ, but when once they lose hold of that, then,
indeed, the anchor has begun to drag, and the beach-comber may
expect his harvest.

Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at the heart of
sameness, such is the estate of language. According as they
endeavour to reduce letters to some large haven and abiding-place
of civility, or prefer to throw in their lot with the centrifugal
tendency and ride on the flying crest of change, are writers dubbed
Classic or Romantic. The Romantics are individualist, anarchic;
the strains of their passionate incantation raise no cities to
confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the
stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things captive to
a voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light
cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their
lives in the effort to attain to self-expression. All means and
modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape
them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences,
and appropriate or invent strange jargons. They furbish up old
words or weld together new indifferently, that they may possess the
machinery of their speech and not be possessed by it. They are at
odds with the idiom of their country in that it serves the common
need, and hunt it through all its metamorphoses to subject it to
their private will. Heretics by profession, they are everywhere
opposed to the party of the Classics, who move by slower ways to
ends less personal, but in no wise easier of attainment. The