flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have
been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and
perishing, as the lightning. 'Words convey the mental treasures of one
period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their
precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which
empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have
sunk into oblivion.' And for all these reasons far more and mightier in
every way is a language than any one of the works which may have been
composed in it. For that work, great as it may be, at best embodies
what was in the heart and mind of a single man, but this of a nation.
The _Iliad_ is great, yet not so great in strength or power or beauty
as the Greek language. [Footnote: On the Greek language and its merits,
as compared with the other Indo-European languages, see Curtius,
_History of Greece,_ English translation, vol. i. pp. 18-28.] _Paradise
Lost_ is a noble possession for a people to have inherited, but the
English tongue is a nobler heritage yet. [Footnote: Gerber (_Sprache
als Kunst,_ vol. i. p. 274): Es ist ein bedeutender Fortschritt in der
Erkenntniss des Menschen dass man jetzt Sprachen lernt nicht bloss, um
sich den Gedankeninhalt, den sie offenbaren, anzueignen, sondern
zugleich um sie selbst als herrliche, architektonische Geisteswerke
kennen zu lernen, und sich an ihrer Kunstschoenheit zu erfreuen.]

And imperfectly as we may apprehend all this, there is an obscure sense,
or instinct I might call it, in every one of us, of this truth. We all,
whether we have given a distinct account of the matter to ourselves or
not, believe that words which we use are not arbitrary and capricious
signs, affixed at random to the things which they designate, for which
any other might have been substituted as well, but that they stand in a
real relation to these. And this sense of the significance of names,
that they are, or ought to be,--that in a world of absolute truth they