CHAPTER II.

FIGURES OF ETYMOLOGY.

PART SECOND.

BEFORE proceeding to our seventh figure, we have a valuable prefatory remark to make.

William Cullen Bryant gave the following excellent advice to a young man who offered him an article for the Evening Post:

"I observe that you have used several French expressions in your article. I think, if you will study the English language, you will find it capable of expressing all the ideas that you may have. I have always found it so; and in all that I have written I do not recall an instance, when I was tempted to use a foreign word, but that on searching I found a better one in my own language.

"Be simple, unaffected; be honest in your speaking and writing. Never use a long word when a short one will do. Do not call a spade a well-known oblong instrument of manual industry; let a home be a home, not a residence; a place a place, not a locality, and so of the rest. Where a short word will do, you always lose by using a long one. You lose in clearness, you lose in honest expression of your meaning; and in the estimation of all men who are competent to judge, you lose in reputation for ability.

"The only true way to shine even in this false world is to be modest and unassuming. Falsehood may be a very thick crust, but in the course of time truth will find a place to break through. Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us, but simplicity and straightforwardness

are.

"Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superior speak no finer. No one ever was a gainer by singularity of words or of pronunciation. The truly wise man will so speak that no one will observe how he speaks. Sydney Smith once remarked:

"After you have written an article, take your pen and strike out half of the words, and you will be surprised to see how much stronger it is."

So much for the advice of our revered sage. It is far from any contradiction of his principle to say that the great recommendation of a word is not its shortness, not its Anglo-Saxon origin, nor yet its length, but solely its being the best fitted to express your idea. Says Marsh:

"Truly able writers select their words, not with reference to their historical origin, but solely for the sake of their adaptation to the effect aimed at on the mind of the reader or hearer; and he who deliberately uses an Anglo-Saxon instead of a more expressive Romance word is as much a pedant as if his diction were composed, in the largest possible proportion, of words borrowed from the vocabulary of Rome. The masters of the English tongue know that each of its great branches has its special adaptation."

Still it is from the well-spring of Anglo-Saxon that the great future, the approaching enrichments, of our language are to come. What vigor of youth, what freshness of spring-time, lie in that direction! What an unlimited supply of words, gloriously new, yet from old ancestral roots, such as unwisdom, disearth, motherland, auld langsyne, inhearth, ingle nook!

VII. Prefixing, or Prosthesis, is the seventh figure of spelling; the prefixing of one or more letters to the beginning of a word, as when Chaucer says of his favorite flower, as it was that of Burns, the daisy:

"The ground was green, ypowder'd with daisy."

However, this is a prefixing only in appearance; the original is that which Chaucer gives; "powdered" is really a front-cut. After his death, in 1401, the very daisies seem to have been poisoned by blood in the fields of England, accursed by civil strife for 190 years; until, in 1590, the "Faerie Queene" was published—a dark age, during which, as old Fuller, the Church historian, has it, "the bells in the church steeples were not heard, for the sound of drums and trumpets;" and Poesy's skylarks were scared into a silence as dismal as was the silence of Devotion's bells.

Mrs. Sigourney supplies us with "amid" for "mid." A poetess she, far from great, yet of much sweetness, and of a piety very attractive. We place on your parlor wall the portrait of Pocahontas, daguerreotyped by mind-light. Alas! if ever History with rude hand should drag down. and blur the picture, and put in its place the features of a coarse savage:

"On sped the seasons, and the forest child

Was rounded to the symmetry of youth,
While o'er her features stole, serenely mild,
The trembling sanctity of woman's truth-
Her modesty, and simpleness, and grace.
Yet those who deeper scan the human face,
Amid the trial hour of fear or ruth,

Could clearly read, upon its heaven-writ scroll,

The high and firm resolve that moved the Roman soul.”

The longer we gaze on this picture, the more have we our misgivings. Not at all likely that ever such a youthful maiden budded under thy wigwam, O Powhatan! Indeed, it is not probable that a female bard of the highest inspiration would be soft enough to believe in any such vision. On the page of Edith May, of Pennsylvania, we recognize far firmer power, in the subjoined description of a hurricane at twilight. The loftier chants of the muse can always bear the scrutiny of common-sense.

Here bursts on you a genuine tempest; here is no picture, but the great original:

"The roar of a chafed lion in his lair

Begirt by leveled spears! A sudden flash
Intense, yet wavering, like a beast's fierce eye
Searching the darkness! The wild bay of winds
Sweeps the burnt plains of heaven; and from afar.
Ranked clouds are riding up like eager horsemen,
Javelin in hand. From the north wings of twilight
There falls unwonted shadow, and strange gloom
Cloisters the unwilling stars. The sky is roof'd
With tempest, and the moon's scant rays fall through,
Like light let dimly through the fissur'd rock
Vaulting a cavern. There is no bough

But lifteth its appealing arm to heaven.

The scudding grass is shivering as it flies;

And herbs and flowers crouch to their mother earth,
Like frightened children. 'Tis more terrible

When the hoarse thunder speaks, and the fleet wind
Stops, like a steed that knows his rider's voice."

Character-painting, in keeping with historic fact, or in accordance with the profundities of universal man, as in unerring Shakespeare, is a chief thing in poesy. Of this Chaucer is a proof. His production of most value, the

Canterbury Tales," excels in its portraitures, as witness his "Nun." If it be true that so much of characterpainting runs through poesy, how deep, how pervading must be sagacity, accuracy, a profound science true to God and to the depths of the human heart, in the flights of the muse; just as the rule of scientific law prevails as much in the wildest whirl of the topmost storm-wave, when realizing the tragic at its highest, as in the dust of the common road, when commonest, most prosaic, most passionless. But let the Nun speak for herself; mark how close an observer of human manners we meet with in Chaucer:

"There also was a nun, a prioress,

That in her smiling was full simple and coy;
Her greatest oath was but by Saint Eloy;
And she was cleped Madame Eglantine.
Full well she sang the service divine,
Entuned in her nose full sweetly;

And French she spake full fair and fitishly,
After the school of Stratford at Bow,
For French of Paris was to her unknowe.
At meat was she well ytaught withal;
She let no morsel from her lips fall,

Nor wet her fingers in her sauce deep.

Well could she carry a morsel and well keep,
That no drop ne'er fell upon her breast;

In courtesie was set full much her lest."

You will mark how Chaucer, known as the Morning Star of our literature, ridicules the most gently in the world the style of this great lady's French; while neatness in eating hath with him the stress which it truly deserves. At his death befell the earliest of the four eras of English poetry, the dark age; next, from Spenser to Milton, its grand heroic age; from Milton to Thomson, the artificial; from Thomson till now, the age of revival. How striking the condemnatory fact, dwelt on by Wordsworth, that between the publication of "Paradise Lost" (P. L.) and that of Thomson's "Seasons," not a single new image fresh from nature can be found in all the poetry of these sixty years-with its "verses of society." These two remarks also demand special notice—that William Langlande's "Vision concerning Piers the Plowman" has a value that is very high, as a mine of the most vigorous English; and that in Mr. Wright's edition you ought by all means to read it over; while we do hereby retract our contemptuous verdict on the "Faerie Queene" passed in the first forty years of our life. As it stands with us at present, the older we grow the more do we like it; as also do we the Old Testament.