expression of a movement stirring the hearts not of one man only but of
many, 'as the trees of the wood are stirred by the wind.' The theory is
consistent or not inconsistent with our own mental experience, and throws
some degree of light upon a dark corner of the human mind.

In the later analysis of language, we trace the opposite and contrasted
elements of the individual and nation, of the past and present, of the
inward and outward, of the subject and object, of the notional and
relational, of the root or unchanging part of the word and of the changing
inflexion, if such a distinction be admitted, of the vowel and the
consonant, of quantity and accent, of speech and writing, of poetry and
prose. We observe also the reciprocal influence of sounds and conceptions
on each other, like the connexion of body and mind; and further remark that
although the names of objects were originally proper names, as the
grammarian or logician might call them, yet at a later stage they become
universal notions, which combine into particulars and individuals, and are
taken out of the first rude agglomeration of sounds that they may be
replaced in a higher and more logical order. We see that in the simplest
sentences are contained grammar and logic--the parts of speech, the Eleatic
philosophy and the Kantian categories. So complex is language, and so
expressive not only of the meanest wants of man, but of his highest
thoughts; so various are the aspects in which it is regarded by us. Then
again, when we follow the history of languages, we observe that they are
always slowly moving, half dead, half alive, half solid, half fluid; the
breath of a moment, yet like the air, continuous in all ages and
countries,--like the glacier, too, containing within them a trickling
stream which deposits debris of the rocks over which it passes. There were
happy moments, as we may conjecture, in the lives of nations, at which they
came to the birth--as in the golden age of literature, the man and the time
seem to conspire; the eloquence of the bard or chief, as in later times the