have colour.
Even to the colour-blind one word differeth from another in glory.

This is no idle fancy, no mere subject for academic debate: it is the
most practical subject in the world. For even as the body is fed not
by food alone but by the living air, so is the spirit nourished not
alone by right action but by inspiring ideas. Ideas are pictures; and
the best ideas are coloured pictures.

Hence the great value of words. It is idle to speak of "words, idle
words," as though they were the transient froth on the permanent ocean
of thought. They are the vehicle, the body of thought. If the thought
be shallow or silly, the words will indeed be "idle." But if the idea
be inspiring the words will be the channel of that inspiration.

The greater part of this power in words is lost to us to-day.
Everything tempts us to hurry over words. We talk too quickly to be
able to pay that respect to words which they deserve; and we read the
newspaper, the magazine, the novel, the play, the poem, with the same
disastrous haste. We devour the words but lose their essence. Hence
there is a grave danger that through this neglect we shut out one of
the main streams by which our life must be fed if it is not to shrink
into mere fretful existence.

There is a curious idea in some minds that fine language consists of
long words difficult to understand. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. Most of the great words--the words of power, as the old
Kabalists called them--are short words, words in common use. And how
common is the sound of them in the mouth of the preacher! Not long ago
I heard an intelligent and cultured man reading one of the many
beautiful passages from the English Bible:--

"Ye dragons, and all deeps;
Fire and hail, snow and vapour;
Stormy wind fulfilling his word;
Mountains and all hills;
Fruitful trees and all cedars, ..."

and he read it as though it were a draper's sale bill. And yet it
needs but a very little imagination for such a passage to become a
series of vivid pictures. Fire, hail, snow, vapour, hills, mountains,
cedars, dragons and deeps--every word is "a word of power" if only
there is no hurry, if only each word as it comes is given time to call
up the picture of the real thing before the inward eye.

And you may hear children of fourteen and fifteen who have passed
examinations in "English" recite line after line of, say, Matthew
Arnold's _The Forsaken Merman_ with a glib self-