him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of
a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an image must have risen up before his
mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from
stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who
to that Greek word which signifies 'that which will endure to be held
up to and judged by the sunlight,' gave first its ethical signification
of 'sincere,' 'truthful,' or as we sometimes say, 'transparent,' can we
deny to him the poet's feeling and eye? Many a man had gazed, we are
sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one
called them 'sierras' or 'saws,' the name by which now they are known,
as _Sierra_ Morena, _Sierra_ Nevada; but that man coined his
imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting
hills which he named.

But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great
moral truths--God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language,
that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know,
asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against
themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the
current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop
Butler turns the word 'pastime'; how solemn the testimony which he
compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against
itself--obliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not
really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and
satisfying joy: [Footnote: _Sermon_ xiv. _Upon the Love of God_.
Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same
testimony out of the word: 'This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and
passing away the time, represents the custom of those wise sort of
people, who think they cannot have a better account of their lives,
than to let them run out and slide away, to pass them over and to baulk