is public addresses, commented at some length on
the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase _s'orienter_ and
called on his young friends to practise upon it in life. There was not a
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out
what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly. This charm
which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and.
set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive. I
cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too
much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style. It would
not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as
coarse as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the
unfamiliarity of the language. But, however this may be, it is certain
that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words
back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a
delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation. What, for
example, is Milton's '_edge_ of battle' but a doing into English of the
Latin _acies? Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht_, what the
goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a
little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may
well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech,
and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who
use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. The part I
have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.

But it is affirmed that there is something innately vulgar in the Yankee
dialect. M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness: '_Je definis un
patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue
toute jeune st qui n'a pas fait fortune._' The first part of his
definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the
Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, and neither, it seems
to me, will quite fit a _patois/_, which is not properly a dialect, but
rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of
pronunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by
side with the finished and universally accepted language. Norman French,
for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI., could hardly be
called _patois_, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a
_lingo_ rather than a dialect. It has retained a few