down my books with a bang, and get me to a bit of fallen timber in the
open air to meditate.

Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of colour language by
means of natural objects? Could we say pine-wood green, larch green,
spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-bee amber? And there are fungi that
have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics are not pleasant.
Butterfly blue--but there are several varieties; and this plan is
interfered with by two things: first, that almost every single item of
nature, however minute, has got a distinctly different colour, so that
the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so very few would
know the object itself that the colour attached to it would have no
meaning. The power of language has been gradually enlarging for a great
length of time, and I venture to say that the English language at the
present time can express more, and is more subtle, flexible, and, at the
same time, vigorous, than any of which we possess a record. When people
talk to me about studying Sanscrit, or Greek, or Latin, or German, or,
still more absurd, French, I feel as if I could fell them with a mallet
happily. Study the English, and you will find everything there, I reply.
With such a language I fully anticipate, in years to come, a great
development in the power of expressing thoughts and feelings which are
now thoughts and feelings only. How many have said of the sea, 'It makes
me feel something I cannot say'! Hence it is clear there exists in the
intellect a layer, if I may so call it, of thought yet dumb--chambers
within the mind which require the key of new words to unlock. Whenever
that is done a fresh impetus is given to human progress. There are a
million books, and yet with all their aid I cannot tell you the colour of
the May dandelion. There are three greens at this moment in my mind: that
of the leaf of the flower-de-luce, that of the yellow iris leaf, and that
of the bayonet-like leaf of the common flag. With admission to a million