qu'on ne puisse les rapporter a quelque etymologie, a fin que ceux, qui
ont la fureur des etymologies, ne soient pas tenus de leur attribuer
une idee fausse. II en doit etre des noms, comme des coups des jeux de
hazard, qui n'ont pour l'ordinaire aucune liaison entre eux: ils
seraient d'autant meilleurs qu'ils seraient moins significatifs, moins
relatifs a d'autres noms, ou a des choses connues, par ce que l'idee ne
se fixant qu'a un seul objet, le saisit beaucoup plus nettement, que
lorsqu'elle se lie avec d'autres objets qui y ont du rapport. There is
truth in what he says, but the remedy he proposes is worse than the
disease.]

The poetry which has been embodied in the names of places, in those
names which designate the leading features of outward nature,
promontories, mountains, capes, and the like, is very worthy of being
elicited and evoked anew, latent as it now has oftentimes become.
Nowhere do we so easily forget that names had once a peculiar fitness,
which was the occasion of their giving. Colour has often suggested the
name, as in the well-known instance of our own 'Albion,'--'the silver-
coasted isle,' as Tennyson so beautifully has called it,--which had
this name from the white line of cliffs presented by it to those
approaching it by the narrow seas. [Footnote: The derivation of the
name _Albion_ has not been discovered yet; it is even uncertain whether
the word is Indo-European; see Rhys, _Celtic Britain_, p. 200.]
'Himalaya' is 'the abode of snow.' Often, too, shape and configuiation
are incorporated in the name, as in 'Trinacria' or 'the three-
promontoried land,' which was the Greek name of Sicily; in 'Drepanum'
or 'the sickle,' the name which a town on the north-west promontory of
the island bore, from the sickle-shaped tongue of land on which it was
built. But more striking, as the embodiment of a poetical feeling, is
the modern name of the great southern peninsula of Greece. We are all