n amounts of brute
light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man's
life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos
from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant,
considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to
extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a
little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to
be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and
human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary,
converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes
more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all
spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols
are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has
moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach
each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as
this is the first language, so is it the last. 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 back-woodsman, which all men relish.

A man's power to connect his thought with its 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 is broken up by
the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure,
of power, and of praise,--and duplicity and falsehood take place of
simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the
will, is in a degree 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 vaults. 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 short 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 o