discourse up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed: 'It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.' This immediate dependence of language upon Nature-this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish."

But there are many conditions requisite to anything like the adequate use of language as the vehicle of thought and emotion. First and foremost, as presented by Emerson, is sincerity on the part of the speaker. By this we understand him to mean that, at least for the time being, the man who speaks well must be himself in earnest. The thing which he says must be subjectively true. The moment his auditors fairly suspect that he is merely talking for effect, his most eloquent words are to them like idle wind.

VERITY IN LANGUAGE.

"A man's power to connect his thought with the proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character; that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas are broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires— the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, duplicity and falsehood take the place of simplicity and truth; the power of Nature as an interpreter of the will

is lost. New imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no bullion in the bank. In due time the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation who for a time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country-those, namely, who hold primarily on Nature."

WORDS AND THINGS.

"But wise men pierce this rotten diction, and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watches his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind contemporaneous with every word which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous; it is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind; it is its proper creation; it is the working of the original cause through the instruments he has already made."

A few paragraphs like these are to our minds worth more than all the volumes of rhetoric which clutter up the shelves of our libraries, and are a

perpetual weariness to the student, who wishes somehow to gain the secret of getting men to think and feel as he thinks and feels, or perhaps as he dimly imagines that he thinks and feels. Everywhere does Emerson insist upon this loving intercourse with Nature in her visible forms as the primal necessity for the adequate presentation of thought. As in this noble passage :

NATURE AND THE ORATOR.

"These facts may suggest the advantage which the country life possesses for a powerful mind over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know from Nature more than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind for evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, shall not lose their lesson altogether in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils-in the hour of revolution-these solid images shall reappear in their morning luster, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms the keys of persuasion, the keys of power, are put into his hands."

In this special passage stress is mainly laid upon the influence of physical nature upon the formation of language—this and its intimate rela-.

But

tions to the growth of the individual soul. nature, in Emerson's view, also includes human beings; and the influence of all men upon each man is elsewhere fully insisted upon. In considering the mighty uses of nature in the forming, or rather in enabling man to form, a language, while admitting the value of its use for our daily needs, he speaks almost scornfully of applying such an implement to ordinary affairs of daily life. This, of course, must be taken with very much of limitation; for if man, standing as he does in the universe, must needs have his kitchen and common council, he can not well avoid talking about them. Emerson's purpose is not to actually underrate this lower use to which language is put, but rather, by contrast, to exalt the higher use.

PARTICULAR MEANINGS.

"We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travelers using the ashes of a volcano to roast their eggs."

The chapter on Language thus concludes, iterating and reiterating much that had been said before, and bringing all to a single point:

THE MYSTERY OF THE UNIVERSE.

"The relation between mind and Nature is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder over this miracle, the wiser man doubts, if at all other times he is not blind and deaf. For the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and Brahmans to that of Pythagoras and Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the roadside, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preëxist in necessary ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit. fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the termination or the circumference of the invisible world. 'Material objects,' said a French philosopher, are necessary kinds of scoria of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side.''

A

It would be curious, were it worth the while, to compare this view of the relation between the Creator and the created with that wrought out with such infinite speculation by the Gnostics, a millennium and a half ago, and by Hindoo