the imagination of men as they did of old, they will make to themselves
a new life, they will acquire a new soul in the room of that which has
ceased to quicken and inform them any more. Let me make clear what I
mean by two or three examples. The Germans, knowing nothing of
carbuncles, had naturally no word of their own for them; and when they
first found it necessary to name them, as naturally borrowed the Latin
'carbunculus,' which originally had meant 'a little live coal,' to
designate these precious stones of a fiery red. But 'carbunculus,' word
full of poetry and life for Latin-speaking men, would have been only an
arbitrary sign for as many as were ignorant of that language. What then
did these, or what, rather, did the working genius of the language, do?
It adopted, but, in adopting, modified slightly yet effectually the
word, changing it into 'Karfunkel,' thus retaining the framework of the
original, yet at the same time, inasmuch as 'funkeln' signifies 'to
sparkle,' reproducing now in an entirely novel manner the image of the
bright sparkling of the stone, for every knower of the German tongue.
'Margarita,' or pearl, belongs to the earliest group of Latin words
adopted into English. The word, however, told nothing about itself to
those who adopted it. But the pearl might be poetically contemplated as
the sea-stone; and so our fathers presently transformed 'margarita'
into 'mere-grot,' which means nothing less. [Footnote: Such is the A.S.
form of _margarita_ in three versions of the parable of the Pearl of
Great Price, St. Matt. xiii. 45; _see Anglo-Saxon Gospels_, ed. Skeat,
1887.] Take another illustration of this from another quarter. The
French 'rossignol,' a nightingale, is undoubtedly the Latin
'lusciniola,' the diminutive of 'luscinia,' with the alteration, so
frequent in the Romance languages, of the commencing 'l' into 'r.'
Whatever may be the etymology of 'luscinia,' it is plain that for
Frenchmen in general the word would no longer suggest any meaning at
all, hardly even for French scholars, after the serious transformations