Ah, sad and strange, as in dark summer dawns, The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. Dear as remember'd kisses after death, THE DEAD WARRIOR. Home they brought her warrior dead: Then they praised him, soft and low. Yet she neither spoke nor moved. Stole a maiden from her place, Yet she neither moved nor wept. Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee- "ASK ME NO MORE." Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But, O too fond, when have I answered thee? Ask me no more. Ask me no more: what answer should I give? Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are sealed: 16* THE SAXON AND LATIN ELEMENTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE; THE PECULIAR PROVINCE OF EACH IN POETIC DICTION. BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.* But the preface (2 vols., 1799 Nothing more An unpopular NE original obstacle to the favourable impression of the Wordsworthian poetry, and an obstacle purely self-created, was his theory of poetic diction. The diction itself, without the theory, was of less consequence; for the mass of readers would have been too blind or too careless to notice it. to the second edition of his Poems 1800), compelled them to notice it. injudicious was ever done by man. truth would, at any rate, have been a bad inauguration, for what, on other accounts, the author had announced as "an experiment." His poetry was already an experiment as regarded the quality of the subjects selected, and as regarded the mode of treating them. That was surely trial enough for the reader's untrained sensibilities, without the unpopular truth besides, as to the diction. But, in the mean time, this truth, besides being unpopular, was also, in part, false: it was true, and it was not true. And it was not true in a * From the author's essay on Wordsworth's Poetry. double way. Stating broadly, and allowing it to be taken for his meaning, that the diction of ordinary life, in his own words, "the very language of man," was the proper diction for poetry, the writer meant no such thing; for only a part of this diction, according to his own subsequent restriction, was available for such a use. And, secondly, as his own subsequent practice showed, even this part was available only for peculiar classes of poetry. In his own exquisite "Laodamia," in his "Sonnets," in his "Excursion," few are his obligations to the idiomatic language of life, as distinguished from that of books, or of prescriptive usage. Coleridge remarked, justly, that "The Excursion" bristles beyond most poems with what are called "dictionary" words; that is, polysyllabic words of Latin or Greek origin. And so it must ever be, in meditative poetry upon solemn philosophic themes. The gamut of ideas needs a corresponding gamut of expressions; the scale of the thinking, which ranges through every key, exacts, for the artist, an unlimited command over the entire scale of the instrument which he employs. Never, in fact, was there a more erroneous direction than that given by a modern rector of the Glasgow University to the students, viz., that they should cultivate the Saxon part of our language, at the cost of the Latin part. Nonsense! Both are indispensable; and, speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as to subjects, both are equally indispensable. Pathos, in situations which are homely, or at all connected with domestic affections, naturally moves by Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to merit the name of lyrical) must be in the state of flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon element of our language. And why? Because the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the basis, and not the superstructure; consequently, it comprehends all the ideas which are natural to the heart of man, and to the elementary situations of life. And, although the Latin often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, yet the Saxon or monosyllabic part has the advantage of precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the language of the nursery, whether for rich or poor, in which great philological academy, no toleration is given to words in "osity" or "ation." There is, therefore, a great advantage, as regards the consecration to our feelings, settled, by usage and custom, upon the Saxon strands, in the mixed yarn of our native tongue. And, universally, this may be remarked-that, wherever the passion of a poem is of that sort, which uses, presumes, or postulates the ideas, without seeking to extend them, Saxon will be the "cocoon" (to speak by the language applied to silkworms), which the poem spins for itself. But, on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, where (as in religious or meditative poetry-Young's, for instance, or Cowper's) the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of the thinking, there the Latin will pre |