and stubble. The tendency of the time to divorce the body of words from the soul of expression, and to shrivel up language into a mummy of thought, would seem to need the rein rather than the whip. The most cursory glance over much of the "literature" of the day, so called, will indicate the peculiar form of marasmus under which the life of language is in danger of being slowly consumed. The most hopeless characteristic of this literature is its complacent exhibition of distressing excellences, its evident incapacity to rise into promising faults. The terms are such as are employed by the best writers, the grammar is good, the morality excellent, the information accurate, the reflections sensible, yet the whole composition neither contains nor can communicate intellectual or moral life; and a critical eulogium on its merits sounds like the certificate of a schoolmaster as to the negative virtues of his pupils. This fluent debility, which never stumbles into ideas nor stutters into passion, which calls its commonplace comprehensiveness, and styles its sedate languor repose, would, if put upon a short allowance of words, and compelled to purchase language at the expense of conquering obstacles, be likely to evince some spasms of genuine expression; but it is hardly reasonable to expect this verbal abstemiousness at a period when the whole wealth of the English tongue is placed at the disposal of the puniest whipsters of rhetoric, — when the art of writing is avowedly taught on the principle of imitating the "best models," -when words are worked into the ears of the young in the hope that something will be found answering to them in their brains, and when Dr. Peter Mark Roget, who never happened on a verbal felicity or uttered a "thought-executing" word in the course of his long and useful life, rushes about, book in hand, to tempt unthinking and unimpassioned mediocrity into the delusion, that its disconnected glimpses of truths never fairly grasped, and its faint movements of embryo aspirations which never broke their shell, can be worded by his specifics into creative thought and passion. The bill of fare is indeed immense; what a pity that the absence of such insignificant elements as mouths, stomachs, and the appetite of hunger, may preclude the possibility of a feast! - Far, therefore, from being disposed to increase the vocabulary of such writers, and students of the art of writing, by books like this "Thesaurus," we grudge them the words they have already pressed into their service. They have not earned the right to use their words by exercising any inward energy. of thought on the things to which they relate. The first condition of true expression is an effort of mind, which restrains rather than stimulates fluency. The ease with which accredited maxims derived through the ear can be attached to words which have been decoyed through the same populous thoroughfare, offers a desperate temptation to avoid the trouble equally of thinking and expressing. The ears write. Take, for example, the truths of morality and religion, which unrealizing minds and rapid pens have so hardened into truisms, that it has become a mark of genius to restore and revivify their original freshness and power. Now there are few creatures so pitiable as to need information on these topics, and few writers so stupid as to be unable to give it. What is required is not information, but inspiration. The maxims and doctrines are the commonest furniture of the commonest minds. The office, therefore, of the moralist is to impart, not moral truisms, but moral life. The office of the preacher is not to communicate the forms of religious doctrine, but to infuse the substance of religious vitality. All moralizing and all preaching are ineffective, which do not thus strike through the understanding directly at the will, and purify and invigorate the sources of moral and religious action. But to do this, requires a face to face knowledge of the truths to be driven home, vivid inward experience poured out in living, breathing, palpitating words. The man who eliminates from these universal principles their divine significance and awful beauty, and prattles about them as truisms, soon becomes as dull, dry, and feeble as his topics, and his poverty of soul is just as evident when his diction is elegant and copious as when it is mean and pinched. The treasures of language, poured into such a mind, are "like money dropped into a dead man's hand." What is really wanted, therefore, "to facilitate the expres sion of ideas," is something which will facilitate the concep tion of ideas. What is really wanted "to assist in literary composition," is a true philosophy of expression, founded on a knowledge of the nature and operations of the mind, and of the vital processes by which thought incarnates and drapes itself in words. Expression is a purely mental act, the work of the same blended force and insight, will and intelligence, that thinks. Its power and clearness answer to the power and clearness of the mind whence it proceeds. Its peculiarities correspond to the peculiarities of the individual nature it represents. Its perfection consists in identifying words with things, in bending language to the form, and pervading it with the vitality, of the thought it aims to arrest and embody. In those cases where thought transcends the sensuous capacities of language to utter its conceptions, the expression will still magically suggest the idea or mood it cannot directly convey, just as a more than earthly beauty looks out from the beautiful faces of Raphael's Madonnas, indicating the subtile passage into form of a soul and sentiment which no mere form could 3 express. There are no more simple words than " green, "sweetness," and "rest," yet what depth and intensity of significance shines in Chaucer's "green," what a still ecstasy of religious bliss irradiates "sweetness" as it drops from the pen of Jonathan Edwards, what celestial repose beams from "rest" as it lies on the page of Barrow! The moods seem to transcend the resources of language, yet they are expressed in common words, transfigured, sanctified, imparadised, by the spiritual vitality which streams through them. The words are among the cheapest articles in Dr. Roget's voluminous catalogue; but where is the cunning rhetorician who can obtain them there? Expression, then, whether direct or suggestive, is thought in the words or through the words, and not thought and the words. Thought implies two elements, the subject thinking and the object thought. When the process of thinking reaches that degree of intensity in which the object of thought is seen in clear vision, when the thinking mind comes into direct contact with the objective thing or idea it has "felt after" and found, the words which it then weaves into the visible garment of its mingled emotion and conception are words sur charged and flooded with life, words which are living things, endowed with the power, not only to communicate ideas, but to convey, as by spiritual conductors, the shock and thrill which attended their conception. Instead of being mere barren signs of abstract notions, they become media through which the life of one mind is radiated into other minds. They inspire as well as inform; invigorate as well as enlighten. Such language is the spiritual body of the thinker, which never dies or grows old, but has a relative immortality on earth, and makes him a contemporary with all succeeding generations; for in such language not only are thoughts embodied, but words are ensouled. The fact, that expression like this is beyond the power of ordinary minds, does not affect its value as a guiding principle of rhetorical education. The difficulty is that the principle is not generally admitted. It is supposed that the development and the discipline of thought are to be conducted apart from the development and discipline of the power of expressing thought. Fill your head with words, and when you get an idea fit it to them, this is the current mode, prolific in famished intellects and starveling expressions. Hence the prevailing lack of intellectual conscientiousness, or closeness of expression to the thing, a palpable interval between them being revealed at the first probe of analysis. Words and things having thus no vital principle of union, being, in fact, attached or tied together, they can be easily detached or unbound, and the expression accordingly bears but the similitude of life. But it is honorable to human nature that men hate to write unless inspired to write. As soon as rhetoric becomes a mechanical exercise it becomes a joyless drudgery, and drudgery ends in a mental disgust which impairs even the power to drudge. There is consequently a continual tendency to rebel against commonplace, even among those engaged in its service. But the passage from this intellectual apathy to intellectual character commonly lies through intellectual anarchy. The literature of facts connected by truisms, and the literature of things connected by principles, are divided by a wide, chaotic domain, appropriated to the literature of desperation; and gen erally the first token that a writer has become disgusted with the truisms of the understanding is his ostentatious parade of the paradoxes of sensibility. He begins to rave the moment he ceases to repeat. Now the vital processes of thought and expression are processes of no single faculty or impulse, but of a whole nature, and mere sensibility, or mere understanding, or mere imagination, or mere will, can never of itself produce the effects of that collected, concentrated, personal power, in which will, intellect, and sensibility are all consolidated in an individuality. The utmost strain and stir of the impulses can but mimic strength, when they are disconnected from character. Passion, in the minds of the anarchists of letters, instead of being poured through the intellect to stimulate intelligence into power, frets and foams into mere passionateness. It does not condense the faculty in which it inheres, but diffuses the faculty to which it coheres. It makes especial claim to force; but the force of simple sensibility is a pretentious force, evincing no general might of nature, no innate, original, self-centred energy. It blusters furiously about its personal vigor, and lays a bullying emphasis on the "ME," but its self-assertion is without self-poise or self-might. The grand object of its tempestuous conceit is to make a little nature, split into fragmentary faculties and impulses, and disporting a convulsive feebleness in a slushy expansiveness of language, look like a great nature, stirred by strong passions, illumined by positive ideas, and directed to definite ends. And it must be admitted that, so far as the public is concerned, it often succeeds in the deception. Commonplace, though crazed into strange shapes by the delirium tremens of sensibility, and uttering itself in strange shrieks and screams, is essentially commonplace still; but it often passes for the frenzy and upward, rocket-like rush of impassioned imagination. The writer, therefore, who is enabled, by a felicitous deformity of nature, to indulge in it, contrives to make many sensible people guilty of the blasphemy of calling him a genius; and if he have the knack of rhyming, and can set to music his agonies of weakness and ecstasies of imbecility, he is puffed as a great poet, superior to all the restraints of artistic law, and is allowed to huddle |