thread was added.

When we come nearer the surface of our subject and speak of language,
we remark that pure English, so far as such is possible, is the most
convenient and expressive. Saxon words cannot be used too plentifully.
They abridge and condense and smack of life and experience, and form the
nerve and sinew of the best writing of our day; while the Latin is the
fat. The Saxon puts small and convenient handles to things, handles that
are easy to grasp; while your ponderous Johnsonian phraseology distends
and exaggerates, and never peels the chaff from the wheat. Johnson's
periods act like a lever of the third kind,--the power applied always
exceeds the weight raised; while the terse, laconic style of later
writers is eminently a lever on the first principle, and gives the mind
the utmost purchase on the subject in hand.

The language of life, and of men who speak to be understood, should be
used more in our books. A great principle anchored to a common word or
a familiar illustration never looses its hold upon the mind; it is like
seeing the laws of Astronomy in the swing of a pendulum, or in the
motion of the boy's ball,--or the law of the tides and the seasons
appearing in the beating of the pulse, or in inspiring and expiring the
breath. The near and the remote are head and tail of the same law, and
good writing unites them, giving wholeness and continuity. The language
of the actual and the practical applied to the ideal brings it at once
within everybody's reach, tames it, and familiarizes it to the mind. If
the writers on metaphysics would deal more in our every-day speech, use
commoner illustrations, seek to find some interpreter of the feelings
and affections of the mind in Nature, out of the mind itself, and thus
keep the life-principle and the thought-principle constantly wedded,
making them mutually elucidate and explain each other, they would be far
more fruitful and satisfying. Cousin is the only writer we know of
who has made any attempt at this, and we believe him to be the most
consistent and intelligent metaphysician that has yet appeared. Surely,
one cannot reasonably object to the height in the heavens from which a
man steals his fire, if he can feed it with his own fuel and cook meat
with it. Though the genealogy of our ideas be traceable to Jove and
Olympus, they must marry their human sisters, the facts of common life
and experience, before they can be productive of anything positive and
v