here was a stage in the history of human speech, during which
all the abstract words in constant use among ourselves were utterly
unknown, when men had formed no notions of virtue or prudence, of
thought and intellect, of slavery or freedom, but spoke only of the man
who was strong, who could point the way to others and choose one thing
out of many, of the man who was not bound to any other and able to do as
he pleased.

"That even this stage was not the earliest in the history of language is
now a growing opinion among philologists; but for the _comparison_ of
legends current in different countries it is not necessary to carry the
search further back. Language without words denoting abstract qualities
implies a condition of thought in which men were only awakening to a
sense of the objects which surrounded them, and points to a time when
the world was to them full of strange sights and sounds, some beautiful,
some bewildering, some terrific, when, in short, they knew little of
themselves beyond the vague consciousness of their existence, and
nothing of the phenomena of the world without. _In such a state they
could but attribute to all that they saw or touched or heard, a life
which was like their own in its consciousness, its joys, and its
sufferings._ That power of sympathizing with nature which we are apt to
regard as the peculiar gift of the poet was then shared alike by all.
This sympathy was not the result of any effort, it was inseparably bound
up with the words which rose to their lips. It implied no special purity
of heart or mind; it pointed to no Arcadian paradise where shepherds
knew not how to wrong or oppress or torment each other. We say that the
morning light rests on the mountains; they said that the sun was
greeting his bride, as naturally as our own poet would speak of the
sunlight clasping the earth, or the moonbeams as kissing the sea.

"We have then before us a stage of language corresponding to a stage in
the history of the human mind _in which all sensible objects were
regarded as instinct with a conscious life_. The varying phases of that
life were therefore described as truthfully as they described their own
feelings or sufferings; and hence every phase became a picture. But so
long as the conditions of their life remained unchanged, they knew
perfectly what the picture meant, and ran no risk of confusing one with
another. Thus they had but to describe the things which they saw, felt,
or hear