tiny dew-drop or in the mighty ocean, and can do it, though on a
different scale, as perfectly in the one as in the other, so the spirit
of poetry can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an Iliad. Nothing
in language is too small, as nothing is too great, for it to fill with
its presence. Everywhere it can find, or, not finding, can make, a
shrine for itself, which afterwards it can render translucent and
transparent with its own indwelling glory. On every side we are beset
with poetry. Popular language is full of it, of words used in an
imaginative sense, of things called--and not merely in transient
moments of high passion, and in the transfer which at such moments
finds place of the image to the thing imaged, but permanently,--by
names having immediate reference not to what they are, but to what they
are like. All language is in some sort, as one has said, a collection
of faded metaphors. [Footnote: Jean Paul: Ist jede Sprache in Ruecksicht
geistiger Beziehungen ein Woerterbuch erblasster Metaphern. We regret
this, while yet it is not wholly matter of regret. Gerber (_Sprache als
Kunst_, vol. i. p. 387) urges that language would be quite unmanageable,
that the words which we use would be continually clashing with and
contradicting one another, if every one of them retained a lively
impress of the image on which it originally rested, and recalled this
to our mind. His words, somewhat too strongly put, are these: Fuer den
Usus der Sprache, fuer ihren Verstand und ihre Verstaendlichkeit ist
allerdings das Erblassen ihrer Lautbilder, so dass sie allmaehlig als
blosse Zeichen fuer Begriffe fungiren, nothwendig. Die Ueberzahl der
Bilder wuerde, wenn sie alle als solche wirkten, nur verwirren und jede
klarere Auffassung, wie sie die praktischen Zwecke der Gegenwart
fordern, unmoeglich machen. Die Bilder wuerden ausserdem einander zum
Theil zerstoeren, indem sie die Farben verschiedener Sphaeren
zusammenfliessenlassen, und damit fuer den Verstand nur Unsinn
bedeuten.]