is not in other ways so full of imagination and poetry that we need
give any diligence to empty it of that which it may possess of these.
It will always have for us all enough of dull and prosaic and
commonplace. What profit can there be in seeking to extend the region
of these? Profit there will be none, but on the contrary infinite loss.
It is _stagnant_ waters which corrupt themselves; not those in
agitation and on which the winds are freely blowing. Words of passion
and imagination are, as one so grandly called them of old, 'winds of
the soul' ([Greek: psyches anemoi]), to keep it in healthful motion and
agitation, to lift it upward and to drive it onward, to preserve it
from that unwholesome stagnation which constitutes the fatal
preparedness for so many other and worse evils.




LECTURE III.

ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS.


Is man of a divine birth and of the stock of heaven? coming from God,
and, when he fulfils the law of his being, and the intention of his
creation, returning to Him again? We need no more than the words he
speaks to prove it; so much is there in them which could never have
existed on any other supposition. How else could all those words which
testify of his relation to God, and of his consciousness of this
relation, and which ground themselves thereon, have found their way
into his language, being as that is the veritable transcript of his
innermost life, the genuine utterance of the faith and hope which is in