ives himself
irresistibly alienated by low terms; they who profess the most zealous
adherence to truth are forced to admit that she owes part of her charms
to her ornaments; and loses much of her power over the soul, when she
appears disgraced by a dress uncouth or ill-adjusted.

We are all offended by low terms, but are not disgusted alike by the
same compositions, because we do not all agree to censure the same terms
as low. No word is naturally or intrinsically meaner than another; our
opinion therefore of words, as of other things arbitrarily and
capriciously established, depends wholly upon accident and custom. The
cottager thinks those apartments splendid and spacious, which an
inhabitant of palaces will despise for their inelegance; and to him who
has passed most of his hours with the delicate and polite, many
expressions will seem sordid, which another, equally acute, may hear
without offence; but a mean term never fails to displease him to whom it
appears mean, as poverty is certainly and invariably despised, though he
who is poor in the eyes of some, may, by others, be envied for his
wealth.

Words become low by the occasions to which they are applied, or the
general character of them who use them; and the disgust which they
produce, arises from the revival of those images with which they are
commonly united. Thus if, in the most solemn discourse, a phrase happens
to occur which has been successfully employed in some ludicrous
narrative, the gravest auditor finds it difficult to refrain from
laughter, when they who are not prepossessed by the same accidental
association, are utterly unable to guess the reason of his merriment.
Words which convey ideas of dignity in one age, are banished from
elegant writing or conversation in another, because they are in time
debased by vulgar mouths, and can be no longer heard without the
involuntary recollection of unpleasing images.

When Macbeth is confirming himself in the horrid purpose of stabbing his
king, he breaks out amidst his emotions into a wish natural to a
murderer:

--Come, thick night!
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heav'n peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, Hold! hold!--

In this passage is exerted all the force of poetry; that force which
calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates
matter: yet, perhaps, scarce any man now peruses it without