WORDS, we are told, are the signs of ideas. This definition at best is faulty, and, in a majority of cases, untrue. Nothing is more common than to see words without any sign of ideas at all. Besides, those who understand the nature of language, and wield uncontrolled dominion over all its powers, have been careful to tell us that the true use of words is not to express but to conceal ideas. Words, moreover, are of such inherent value in themselves, and in the concerns of the world exercise such untrammeled influence,

that it is unjust to degrade them from sovereigns into representatives. It would be much more modest for lovers of definition to say, not that words are, but that they should be the signs of ideas. The moralist is more philosophical. He distinguishes carefully between qualities and their application. He defines the laws of ethics, and informs us that men should obey them, not that they do.

The true ruler of this big, bouncing world is the Lexicon. Every new word added to its accumulated thousands, is a new element of servitude to mankind. We should therefore look sharply at all axioms which seem to fix the signification of these little substantives and sovereigns. The notion that they are the signs of thought can be disposed of without any train of tedious argument; because the originators and defenders of that notion are found instantly inconsistent, when we unite any two of their propositions. For instance, the remark is often heard that certain words in certain connections are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Now if words be full of sound, they must necessarily be sound words, and if words are the signs of ideas, sound words must represent sound thoughts. Here is a logical dilemma for these axiomatic gentlemen.

Indeed words, in themselves, are nothing more than "mouthfuls of spoken wind," the sons and daughters of the tongue and lungs. They are hardened into consistency by a process of pens, ink and paper. In this state they take form. But naturally they are immaterial substances like thoughts. The sculptor embodies an idea in marble, and we discriminate between the essence and the form. Why should we not also distinguish be

rance.

Shakspeare, speaking through Lorenzo, regrets with much feeling the thickness of ear which prevents us from drinking in the music of the spheres. But how much more, in a moral and intellectual point of view, should we lament that hard condition of our faculty of hearing, by which we are prevented from enjoying all the sweet noises of the past and compelled to hear only the harsh gutterals of the present. Every disturbance of the atmosphere, caused by the ejection of a word, does not cease with our perception of it, but is everlastingly active. All around us now are the words of Noah, and Moses, and Plato, and Socrates, and Shakspeare, and Milton; and if our ears were only delicate enough to convey the sounds into our minds, we might hear, with our outward organ, Plato converse with Phrædrus on the soul's immortality, Socrates gravel a sophist with his interrogative logic, Shakspeare sting Ben Johnson or Master Dekkar with a joke worthy of Thersites, and Milton ask quaker Ellwood to read Homer to him, or rebuke his daughters for unkindness and inattention. The air is a more faithful chronicler of words than books. Every whisper of wickedness, which has fallen from the white lips of a tyrant or murderer, and which has never passed into but one human heart, is still alive in the air, and circling the earth in company with the song of Miriam, and the thunder of Luther, and the low prayer of Ridley, and the scoff of D'Holbach, and the profaneness of Rochester, and the denunciations of Burke. Truly are we surrounded with Voices. sacredness and awful responsibilities of speech-the latent importance of idle words-consist in ever present existence. No sound that goes from the lip into the

The

air, can ever die, even in a sensual sense, until the atmosphere, which wraps our planet in its huge embrace, has passed into nothingness. Words, then, have a being of their own; they exist after death, or rather they continue to exist after all memory of them has departed from the minds into which they originally entered.

Leaving, however, these logical and lofty notions of words, and coming down to the everyday world of books and men, we observe many queer developments of the cozenage of language. The most fluent man seems the most influential. All classes appear to depend upon words. Principles are nothing in comparison with speech. A politician is accused of corruption, inconsistency, and loving number one more than number ten thousand. Straightway he floods the country with words, and he is honorably acquit ted. A gentleman of far-reaching and purse-reaching intelligence concocts twenty millions of pills, and "works" them off to agents, and, in the end, transfers the whole from his laboratory to the stomachs of an injured and oppressed people, by means of words. Miss A. stabs the spotless name of Mrs. P. with a wordstiletto. The poisonous breath of a venomous fanatic moulds itself into syllables, and, lo! a sect of christians is struck with leprosy. An author wishes to be sublime, but has no fire in him to give sparkle and heat to his compositions. His ideas are milk and water-logged,— feeble, common-place, nerveless, witless, and soulless; or his thoughts are ballasted with lead instead of being winged with inspiration. "What shall I do!" he cries, in the most plaintive terms of aspiring stupidity. Poor poetaster! do not despair! take to thy dictionary-drench thy thin blood with gin-learn the power of words. Pile the Pelion of Rant on the Ossa of Hyperbole, and thy small fraction of the Trite shall be exalted to the heights of the Sublime and the admiring gaze of many people shall be fixed upon it, and the coin shall jingle in thy pocket, and thou shalt be denominated Great! But if thy poor pate be incapable of the daring, even in expression, then grope dubiously in the dismal swamps of verbiage, and let thy mind's fingers feel after spungy and dropsical words, out of which little sense can be squeezed, and arrange the oozy epithets and unsubstantial substantives into lines, and out of the very depths of Bathos, thou shalt arise a sort

of mud-Venus, and men shall mistake thee for her that rose from the sea, and the coin shall still clink in thy fob, and thou shalt be called Beautiful! Such is the omnipotence of words! They can exalt the little; they can depress the high; a ponderous polysyllable will break the chain of an argument, or crack the pate of a thought, as a mace or a battle-axe could split the crown of a soldier in the elder time.

To cover a man with contempt or obloquy, it is only necessary to apply to him some catchword of theology or politics. Society will say with the sagacious Polonious, that such a word is good or bad, and judge of the living noun by the character of verbal tin-pail, that wit or malice has appended to its tail. A man or woman, who has had certain impertinent or degrading adjectives applied to his or her name will feel their sting and rattle long after they have been proved false and malignant. "A person with a bad name is already half hanged," saith the old Proverb.

Words are most effective when arranged in that order which is called style. The great secret of a good style, we are told, is to have proper words in proper places. To marshal one's verbal battalions in such order, that they may bear at once upon all quarters of a subject, is certainly a great art. This is done in different ways. Swift, Temple, Addison, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, Burke, are all great generals in the discipline of their verbal armies, and the conduct of their paper wars. Each has a system of tactics of his own, and excels in the use of some particular weapon. The tread of Johnson's style is heavy and sonorous, resembling that of an elephant or a mailclad warrior. He is fond of leveling an obstacle by a polysyllabic battering-ram. Burke's words are continually practicing the broad-sword exercise, and sweeping down adversaries with every stroke. Arbuthnot "plays his weapon like a tongue of flame." Addison draws up his light infantry in orderly array, and marches through sentence after sentence, without having his ranks disordered or his line broken. Luther is different. His words are "half battle ;"" his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter." Gibbon's legions are heavily armed, and march with precision and dignity to the music of their own tramp. They are splendidly equipped, but a nice eye can discern a little rust

its progress but how could the thought of such a light trifler as Cibber travel through so glorious a maze without being lost or crushed in the journey? The plain, manly language of John Locke could hardly be translated into the terminology of Kant-would look out of place in the rapid and sparkling movement of Cousin's periods and would appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart. Every writer, therefore, is his own standard. The law by which we judge of his sentences must be deduced from his sentences. If we can discover what the man is, we know what his style ought to be. If it indicate his character, it is, relatively, good; if it contradict his character, though its cadences are faultless, it is still bad and not to be endured. To condemn Carlyle and Macauley because they do not run their thoughts into the moulds of Addison or Burke, is equivalent to condemning a bear because he does not digest stones like an ostrich, or a chicken, because it goes on two legs instead of four. The alleged faults belong to organization. We may quarrel with a writer if we please, for possessing a bad or tasteless nature, but not with the style, which takes from that nature its form and movement.

It is singular that Macauley and Carlyle, continually protesting against affectation in the mode of expressing thought, should be themselves considered the high priests at the shrine of affectation. In truth, no writers are less open to the charge. Their styles are exact mirrors of their minds. Any other form of expression, would in them, be gross affectation. When they change their dispositions and modes of thinking, and preserve their way of writing, they will then be justly liable to rebuke, and would be justly punished with neglect. Words have generally been termed the dress of thought. We recollect of hearing a lecturer on elocution give a minute description of the manner in which this curious tailoring of ideas was effected. He appareled an abstract conception of the Intellect in stockings, shirt, trowsers, vest, coat and bright buttons, and showed us those closets and drawers in the brain's chamber, where such articles of clothing were deposited. This notion of words being the dress of thought is indeed curious. Let us suppose a case. An Imagination rises from the soft bed of Ideality, on hearing the tinkle of Master Rea

son's or Master Volition's bell. Of course

it does not desire to appear before company in a state of nudity, and it accordingly trips lightly into the dressing-room of the Noddle, and overhauls the mind's wardrobe. Now this wardrobe in some heads is scanty and poor, in others overflowing with rich and costly apparel. At any rate our Imagination slips on the most shining and flaring suit of clothes it can find, and then slides along a number of nerves into the lungs, and sails out of the mouth on a stream of sound, to delight the world with its presence. In the verbal wardrobe of Wordsworth there would be few rich garments: consequently most of his thoughts or fancies would be compelled to appear in peasants' frocks or suits of "homely russet brown." All of Byron's ideas aspired to be clad in regal splendor; and, as they were in the custom of crowding thick and fast into the dressing-room, there must have been some jostling and fighting among them, for the most costly and showy suits. Vice and Falsehood would crave fine apparel as well as Virtue and Truth; and, in his case, they must often have succeeded in bullying the latter out of their rights and " tights." There are a class of authors who have rich garments but no thoughts to put into them. The garments, however, please the eye of the multitude, and few discover that they are stuffed with brass instead of brains. Some poets have nothing but ragged clothes in their wardrobe, and their poor shivering Ideas go sneaking about the alleys of letters, ashamed to be seen by their more richly-dressed relations. Others, though in rags, have a certain quick impudence, like that of Robert Macaire, which enables them to bustle about among their betters, and seem genteel though in rags. We sometimes observe Thoughts in the prim coats and broad hats of quakers; but they are not admitted to the West End," excepting, of course, "the West End of the Universe." Sir Charles Sedley was distinguished for writing poems of considerable impurity of idea and considerable purity of language. His biographer therefore is careful to inform us that though the sentiments of Sir Charles were as foul as those of Rochester, they were not so immodest, because they were covered with clean linen. Dryden's wardrobe, we are told, was like that of a Russian noble,-"all filth and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables." To such speculations and fancies as these are we led, when we acknowledge the

truth of the maxim, that words are the dress of thought.

Words, however, even in the common meaning, are not, when used by a mastermind, the mere dress of thought. Such a definition degrades them below their sphere, and misconceives their import ance. They are, as Wordsworth has happily said, the incarnation of thought. They bear the same relation to ideas, that the body bears to the soul. Take the most beautiful and sincere poetry, which has ever been written, and its charm is broken as soon as the words are disturbed or altered. If any expression can be employed except that which is used, the poet is a bungling rhetorician or writes on the surface of his theme. A Thought embodied and embrained in fit words, walks the earth a living being. No part of its body can be stricken from it, or injured, without disfiguring the beauty of its form or spoiling its grace of motion. Such Thoughts, perhaps, are few in number; but wo upon those tasteless critics, who would meddle with those few, and dare to alter their organization, on the plea of improvement!

Words in a few "eminent hands" are servile ministers; but generally, even in great writers, they are kings who rule, not subjects who obey. In some minds they obtain "sovereign sway and masterdom" over the whole domain of thought and emotion. This servitude to words often produces injurious results to the writer. It is the parent of many fallacies and inconsistencies. For instance-a reasoner desires to argue closely and logically; a word often leads him astray into a sophism, or tempts him, by its winning looks, to slide into episodes. A critic wishes to analyze a book; but instead of analysis he gives his readers eulogy or denunciation; for certain words which sprang up, like flowers or thistles, in his path, were too sweet or too sharp for him to avoid. To give point to a period, some writers will throw in a word which will stab innocence or mediocrity like a poignard; to make a sentence end harmoniously, others will pad it with

words, which are meaningless or out of place. In describing characters or scenery, the general custom is to employ language which is beautiful or strong, rather than what is applicable. Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning. Amplitude of comprehension is a much finer phrase than good reasoning powers; and consequently every respectable thinker is made a Bacon; vivid imagination sounds better than moderate talent, and of course, every rhymestringer is a Byron; miserable drivelling has a sharper edge than mediocre merit, and all common-place writers are therefore to be fools or dunces. Lord Byron, in alluding to the supposed cause of Keats's death, said—

"Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article."

Hunt told him that Keats was not killed in this way. Byron promised to strike it out. But the smartness and the rhyme, were temptations stronger than his conscience, and he allowed the couplet to remain.

It would be an easy matter to mention some words which have exercised greater influence, and swayed with more absolute power, than Alexander or Napoleon. Any one can pick up in a newspaper the sovereigns of our own country. A word often keeps its seat in the mind of a people, after the thought to which originally it was nominally attached, has disappeared. Words head armies, overthrow dynasties, man ships, separate families, cozen cozeners, and steal hearts and purses. And if physiologists and metaphysicians are driven into a corner, and are compelled to give the real distinction between human beings and animals, they are almost sure to say it consists in the power of speech-in the capacity to frame, use and multiply at discretion, these omnipotent "mouthfuls of spoken wind." Words-words-words!