subjects, (death, religion, &c.,) with the common key of ordinary
conversation. But good taste is not in itself sufficient to account for
a scrupulousness so general and so austere. In the lowest classes there
is a shuddering recoil still felt from uttering coarsely and roundly
the anticipation of a person's death. Suppose a child, heir to some
estate, the subject of conversation--the hypothesis of his death is put
cautiously, under such forms as, 'If anything but good should happen;'
'if any change should occur;' 'if any of us should chance to miscarry;'
and so forth. Always a modified expression is sought--always an
indirect one. And this timidity arises under the old superstition still
lingering amongst men, like that ancient awe, alluded to by Wordsworth,
for the sea and its deep secrets--feelings that have not, no, nor ever
will, utterly decay. No excess of nautical skill will ever perfectly
disenchant the great abyss from its terrors--no progressive knowledge
will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless
power given to words of a certain import, or uttered in certain
situations, by a parent, to persecuting or insulting children; by the
victim of horrible oppression, when laboring in final agonies; and by
others, whether cursing or blessing, who stand central to great
passions, to great interests, or to great perplexities.

And here, by way of parenthesis, we may stop to explain the force of
that expression, so common in Scripture, '_Thou hast said it._' It
is an answer often adopted by our Saviour; and the meaning we hold to
be this: Many forms in eastern idioms, as well as in the Greek
occasionally, though meant _interrogatively_, are of a nature to
convey a direct categorical _affirmation_, unless as their meaning
is modified by the cadence and intonation. _Art thou_, detached
from this vocal and accentual modification, is equivalent to _thou
art_. Nay, even apart from this accident, the popular belief