the principle and the end with the mother wit of a savage. Indeed,
from the age of fourteen, by one of those startling freaks in which
nature sometimes indulges, and which proved how anomalous was his
temperament, he would utter quite simply ideas of which the depth was
not revealed to me till a long time after.

"Often," he has said to me when speaking of his studies, "often
have I made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down
the abyss of the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of
grass tossing on the ripples of a stream. Starting from Greece, I
would get to Rome, and traverse the whole extent of modern ages.
What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a
word! It has, of course, received various stamps from the
occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed
different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander
to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion?
Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions,
its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an
ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they
represent? Then, to whose genius are they due? If it takes great
intelligence to create a word, how old may human speech be? The
combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to
the word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the
character of each nation, of the unknown beings whose traces
survive in us.

"Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to
thought, from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic
presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to
written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of