In
reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find
that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings
without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a
diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost.
Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or
who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to
mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the
fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not
mean what is technically called a living language,--the contrivance,
hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds,
even now, sailing o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each
other and make known their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one
that is still hot from the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened
yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in
the moulds of new thought. So soon as a language has become literary,
so soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of life,
the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost as dead as
Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in itself essentially
original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously
reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression and
even in thought.
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