f speech; but for the most part it is
in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any
letter is conveyed. There are words unwritten and untranslatable into
any nouns that are nevertheless felt as above, about and underneath the
gross material symbols that lie scrawled upon the paper; and the deeper
the feeling with which anything is written the more pregnant will it be
of meaning which can be conveyed securely enough, but which loses rather
than gains if it is squeezed into a sentence, and limited by the parts of
speech. The language is not in the words but in the heart-to-heartness
of the thing, which is helped by words, but is nearer and farther than
they. A correspondent wrote to me once, many years ago, "If I could
think to you without words you would understand me better." But surely
in this he was thinking to me, and without words, and I did understand
him better . . . So it is not by the words that I am too presumptuously
venturing to speak to-night that your opinions will be formed or
modified. They will be formed or modified, if either, by something that
you will feel, but which I have not spoken, to the full as much as by
anything that I have actually uttered. You may say that this borders on
mysticism. Perhaps it does, but their really is some mysticism in
nature.

To return, however, to _terra firma_. I believe I am right in saying
that the essence of language lies in the intentional conveyance of ideas
from one living being to another through the instrumentality of arbitrary
tokens or symbols agreed upon, and understood by both as being associated
with the particular ideas in question. The nature of the symbol chosen
is a matter of indifference; it may be anything that appeals to human
senses, and is not too hot or too heavy; the essence of the matter lies
in a mutual covenant that whatever it is it shall stand invariably for
the same thing, or nearly so.

We shall see this more easily if we observe the differences between
written and spoken language. The written word "stone," and the spoken
word, are each of them symbols arrived at in the first instance
arbitrarily. They are neither of them more like the other than they are
to the idea of a stone which rises before our minds, when we either see
or hear the word, or than this idea again is like the actual stone
itself, but nevertheless the spoken symbol and the written one each alike
convey with certainty the combination of