upon this subject would be the history of Paris society and of French,
that is, Parisian, literature from the commencement of the latter half
of the reign of Louis XIV. to that of Buonaparte, compared with the
preceding philosophy and poetry even of Frenchmen themselves.

The second form, or more properly, perhaps, another distinct cause, of
this diseased disposition is matter of exultation to the philanthropist
and philosopher, and of regret to the poet, the painter, and the
statuary alone, and to them only as poets, painters, and
statuaries;--namely, the security, the comparative equability, and ever
increasing sameness of human life. Men are now so seldom thrown into
wild circumstances, and violences of excitement, that the language of
such states, the laws of association of feeling with thought, the starts
and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest and
least obvious likeness presented by thoughts, words, or objects,--these
are all judged of by authority, not by actual experience,--by what men
have been accustomed to regard as symbols of these states, and not the
natural symbols, or self-manifestations of them.

Even so it is in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound
'sun', or the figures 's', 'u', 'n', are purely arbitrary modes of
recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only
sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness
'per se'. But the language of nature is a subordinate 'Logos', that was
in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the
thing it represented.

Now the language of Shakspeare, in his Lear for instance, is a something
intermediate between these two; or rather it is the former blended with
the latter,--the arbitrary, not merely recalling the cold notion of the