useful John-but instead is a corruption of jaune dorée, golden yellow. "Demijohn" is another word which has an abusive sound, as though the typical John were so addicted to containing raw spirits that the name had come to be a synonym for the original package; but demijohn is our modified pronunciation of the French dame jeanne, which is itself a corruption of Damaghan, a Persian town famous for its glass ware. Among our birds are several which bear personal names. Beside those which have been already mentioned may be noticed the “magpie" and the "robin." The "canary" bears the name of its original home. But the familiar "bob-o'-link" is a song-name; and Byrant has only written out in full the title by which this loquacious little sprite is forever nicknaming himself, and which he should be allowed to wear summa cum laude; Merrily swinging on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his little dame, Over the mountain-side or mead, Robert of Lincoln is telling his name. The "whip-poor-will" bears another song name; and among insects, the "katydid ;" and Morris and Holmes have tried to translate their dainty notes into the rougher sounds of human verse. A notable fact about many name-words is the great distance between their present use and their original meaning. Few of them bring us any reminiscence of the signification contained in the root from which they spring. The word "vandal," for example, from the German wandeln, was applied to certain invading hordes to express their nomadic character; but to us a "vandal" act is a piece of ruthless barbarism, and bears no trace whatever of the root-sense. The name amazon has become domesticated in our vernacular to denote a woman of strong masculine spirit and temper; and is equally far from its original import, whether we adopt the common fable that these female warriors burned off the right breast (a-μa2os) so as not to be hindered by it in using the bow and spear, or consider them as full-orbed priestesses of the Ephesian Diana. A monitor is one who admonishes; but a newly invented vessel of war happens to be christened the Monitor, and straightway we have a new generic use for the word, and catalogue our "monitors" and "monitor-cars" along with our other improvements. Ad แ miral Vernon wears a rough suit of grogram, whence his affectionate tars dub him Old Grog, and then apply the same sobriquet to the watered rum he serves out for their rations; but "one who knows" reports the difference between grogram and 'grog" as toto cœlo at least. The muse of eloquence and heroic poetry bears a name given her for her sweet voice, and the inventor of a late musical instrument of torture has adopted it and expects the world to call his steam organ a "calliope; " but no voyager down the Hudson in a boat which discoursed to the exasperated banks with one of these Plutonian attachments, could ever discover the connection between the instrument and its name. The word "utopian" comes nearer than most words of its class to the reproduction of the primal meaning. Compounded of ou and Toxos, "no-place," it was a suitable name for Sir Thomas More to apply to his imaginary island, and for the rest of the world to apply to the millennial state of society which he pictured upon it; whence it has come to mean any project which is too good to be practicable, and for which "no place" can be found in this naughty world. The word last cited is a contribution from fiction. It is only another proof of the elasticity of language and its amicable relations to literature, that it so readily receives and acclimates the exotics of imagination. Fiction has done more for the expressiveness of speech than could well be described. What a convenient term, for example, is "quixotic." [And for evident reasons we ought to have, but have not, a similar adjective crusotic."] How difficult it would be to exactly supply the place of Swift's "liliputian," Boiardo's "rodomontade," Shakspeare's "benedict," Kenny's "Jeremy Diddler," Mrs. Centlivre's "Simon Pure," Dickens' "Circumlocution Office." And we might find it still harder to spare that inimitable bevy of dames created for us by Comedy and Fiction, of whom Mrs. Malaprop, Mrs. Grundy, Mrs. Partington and Mrs. Caudle are perhaps the most signally eminent, and without whose aid some of our ideas could never be expressed with such humorous brevity and exactness. It would require a long roll of honor to catalogue all the impersonations of fiction which have passed into common use as synonyms for well known traits of character. And if Boiardo, exulting in the successful invention of the name Rodomonte for his swaggering Moor, had the village bells rung for joy, it would not be preposterous to think of our Mother English as furnished with a joy-bell to ring in from the realms of imagination every worthy new-comer into the language. If the history of liberty is made up of personal sacrifice, the history of civilization is made up of personal effort. We can trace the path of some inventions, some sciences, some professions, by the names which line the way. It would be impossible to measure the value to the race of some single lives. In many of these words rubbed down by the friction of centuries from the names of those who labored or suffered or sinned enough to immortalize their memory, are contained strange episodes of history, and as costly as they are strange. Language is full of honors to the illustrious dead who have led the race. It is the field also where history takes some of its sternest revenges, by impaling the very name of the criminal in a perennial crucifixion. There are obsolete words which are only sarcophagi, and hold at bottom a little dust of ideas long since mouldered into oblivion. But there are others, and far more, which like antique funeral urns emptied of their ashes and filled with living flowers, have parted with their old dead meaning, and are now full again of young fresh life. The qualities which are added by such changes are rather scientific than poetical. And though a language is not necessarily poetic because fresh and prineval, nor necessarily unpoetic when it has reached its periods of maturest culture, the new life it receives from the earnest leaders of each generation rarely adds to its power of artistic expression, but rather to its resources for accurate statement and clear definition. ARTICLE VIII-AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTERS. It is forty years since Cole-the first of a succession of landscape painters who have given American art the distinctive character of a school-in a series of allegorical pictures entitled "The Voyage of Life," awakened, to some extent, the popular taste for landscape. Engravings of these pictures were to be found in almost every home. They gave expression to the then prevailing sentiment which tinctured, more or less, every phase of thought: manifesting itself in "tracts for the times," in certain appendages to poems exhibiting with conscious. cleverness-we cannot call it naiveté-the ingenious machinery of the thought aptly serving this idea. It was thrust so pointedly in the eye of the reader, that he was denied any personal interpretation whatever to even the subtleties that have their own natural and insinuating actions. Art was sacrificed for the story it would illustrate, and poesy for the "moral" it should point. Thus Art was enfeebled by super-sensuous ideas, il suiting its capacities for expression: while poesy was too subservient to narrow commonplace, that dried its sap, and, like a trailing vine stiffly lengthened out, tied it tightly to some well-known precept. It was too palpable, too conscious, too like the strut of a moralizing mentor rudely thrust in between truth and beauty and the tender soul. We have grown more trustful of these; perhaps more charitable in the estimate of our ability to interpret them rightly; at all events, our views of morality have broadened, while the true and the beautiful have so far gained by this that we are now ready to admit that they possess virtues of their own more effective and powerful than commonplace reiterations of accepted precepts. We have outgrown this tendency so far as to look back upon it with more of curiosity than sympathy. New values have been let in upon the mind with the closer investigation of scientific fact and truth. This has given new character to thought. The pale reflections of medieval reminiscences are being dissipated by the full blaze of revived Greek tendencies in our sympathies, which compel the fancy to a basis of fact, and plant the ideal upon the true foundations of the real. Cole was only truly himself when he broke away from those false notions of the aim and end of art, and gave us the unaffected sentiment which he drew freshly from the inspirations of Nature, and the moral influence of that voice which goes up from her unutterable stillness, speaking more eloquently than words, more pointedly than precept, searching the conscience more deeply by the light that is inherent in the very principles of beauty and truth. He did this so effectually as to inspire the artistic mind of the country with sympathies that may be traced to this source. Several of our best painters acknowledge that through the pictures of Cole their feeling for landscape was first touched. Cole's sympathies were rather those of a poet than an artist. His choice of subject indicated this "The Course of Empire," "The Voyage of Life," &c. These are themes for the poet rather than the painter. Art was overstrained to suit the sequence of thought; its own appropriate values were subordinated to extraneous ideas. That which is eminently qualified for mental imagery is ill adapted to the sensible forms of art. Through these it aims at their highest possible transfigurement consistent with the utmost refinements of sense. But it is no less dependent upon the sensible appearance than music is upon the palpable conditions of sound. Cole's best qualities are not to be found in these series of his works; they are to be met with in his forest scenes, in his Italian views, in his free and forcible rendering of pastoral landscape. The next link in the chain of special talent that has distinguished native landscape painting is Durand-originally an engraver, and never entirely freeing himself from its influence on his style. With an individuality in marked contrast with that of Cole, Durand's treatment of the landscape is no less poetic and refined. Perhaps the most masterly of his works is that which has for subject Goldsmith's metaphor: As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form, Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm, |