he names it 'convenient!' 'Courteous,' again, which, of course, is French born and bred, is, to the pompenamored Gallican that which pertains to the graces gathered at the cour, or court; whereas the straightforward old Roman clustered all his ideas of the courteous around one to whom he could go up and speak-what he called homo affabilis, and we 'affable.'

RAMBLE ELEVENTH.

THE GROWTH OF WORDS.

"An idiom is an organism subject, like every organism, to the laws of development. One must not consider a language as a product dead and formed but once: it is an animate being and ever creative."

Wilhelm von Humboldt.

THE Conception of language that has arisen prophetic on the thought of modern times is a high and great one. Speech is no more the dead mechanism it used to be conceived. Each language is a living organism; the totality of languages a grand series of organisms, all built after the same archetype, the same skeleton; but each presenting its special structural stamp, as fish, reptile, bird, mammal, are all modifications of one primitive Idea.

Yes! Language is indeed alive! Primordial creation and manifestation of the mind, Language throbs with the pulses of our life. This is the wondrous

babe, begotten of the blended love of spirit and of matter-physical, mystical, the Sphinx! Through speech man realizes and incarnates himself; and Oken has an oracular utterance that "without speech there is no world."

It is one of the current wranglings, How language originated: as though Language were not an innate energy and aspiration! Language is not a cunning conventionalism arbitrarily agreed upon: it is an internal necessity. Language is not a fiction, but a truth. Language is begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his unity with nature.

This vitality of speech manifests itself in a two-fold manifestation: in the possession of a distinctive personality and identity-in material elements and formal laws that stamp it with the stamp of linguistic individuality; and, further, in that other characteristic of every living organism-in the exhibition of growth, progress, decay—in the ongoing of processes of absorption, assimilation and elimination-in the inworking and outworking of the creative energy.

And it is in this sense that the English language is alive as displaying successive processes of growth and development within the limits of its linguistic individuality.

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.

267

The causes of that marvelous identity we call the English Language lie deep in the manifold influences that have made the English Nation. The History of a Language is measurable only in the terms of all the factors that have shaped a people's life. A nation's history is the result of the double action of internal impulses and external events. And Language ex presses the infusions from all these-subtily absorbing the ethnology of a nation, its geography, government, traditions, culture, faith. Shooting its deep tap-root into eldest antiquity, drawing from the pith and sap of that grandest of all families of races and tongues— the Indo-European stock; receiving living grafts from France and Italy and Scandinavia, this divine tree of the English Speech has grown up into its sublime proportions nurtured by the history of a thousand years.

Of this superb Speech-the grandest in the world -we have no adequate treatment. There is no History of the English Language. Nor any Dictionary of the English Language. We have no such work on the English Language as the Germans possess in the "Teutonic Grammar" of Jacob Grimm, who has with masterly method and largest appreciation of modern Philology, traced the formative influences of the German speech, as it has shaped itself intc

conscious individuality. A History of the English Language, rising out of a full appreciation of the Philosophy of Speech (to which must go that large hospitality and impartiality that flows from the thought of the Ensemble), answering to the requirements of modern research, and after the broad, free methods America lets down, has yet to come. To the achievement of this epic work may well go the loftiest energies of both branches of the Anglican stock and speech!

How far would the Philosophy of the English Language reach! What a retrospect of ages, growths, processes, accretions, events, forces, impulses! In the motions of man's creative energy how all is interwoven with the all! How celestial forces ascend and descend and hand each other the golden pails!

An appreciation of the organic laws of the English Language in its historic unfolding is inseparable from considerations that embrace the ensemble of Languages. For ascending through the Anglo-Saxon idioms to the stock to which they belong-the Germanic or Teutonic group of tongues, we are here carried back into that grand radiation of race and speech which modern philologic criticism has formuled as the INDO-EUROPEAN line of peoples and tongues; nor do we stop till we have reached the