portion,--so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the
imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their
graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which
might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever.
The phrase is a striking one; the only fault one can find with it is
that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this 'fossil
poetry'; but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that
it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as
effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense,
as of the imagination or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral
sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of
that perversion. On all these points I shall enter at full in after
lectures; but I may give by anticipation a specimen or two of what I
mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully
intelligible to all.

Language then is 'fossil poetry'; in other words, we are not to look
for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its
poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is
itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and
imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some
deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to
illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may
have grown trite and ordinary now: perhaps through the help of this
very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem
little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first
discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express
it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and
figurative sense, this man was in his degree a poet--a maker, that is,
of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for