oing to Washington to-morrow?" "No:
I contemplate moving into the country." This is more than exaggeration
and inflation: it is desecration of a noble word, born of man's higher
being; for contemplation is an exercise of the very highest faculties,
a calm collecting of them for silent meditation--an act, or rather a
mood, which implies even more than concentrated reflection, and
involves themes dependent on large, pure sentiment. An able lawyer has
to reflect much upon a broad, difficult case in order to master it;
but when in the solitude of his study he is drawn, by the conflicts
and wrongs he has witnessed during the day, to think on the
purposes and destiny of human life, he more than reflects--he is
lifted into a contemplative mood. Archbishop Trench, in his valuable
volume on the "Study of Words," opens a paragraph with this sentence:
"Let us now proceed to _contemplate_ some of the attestations for
God's truth, and some of the playings into the hands of the devil's
falsehood, which may be found to lurk in words." Here we suggest that
the proper word were _consider_; for there is activity, and a
progressive activity, in the mental operation on which he enters,
which disqualifies the verb _contemplate_.

Habitual showiness in language, as in dress and manners, denotes lack
of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American magniloquence--the
tendency to which is getting more and more subdued--comes partly from
national youthfulness, partly from license, that bastard of liberty,
and partly from the geographical and the present, and still more the
prospective, political grandeur of the country, which Coleridge
somewhere says is to be "England in glorious magnification."

I AM FREE TO CONFESS. An irredeemable vulgarism.

IN THIS CONNECTION. Another.

INDEBTEDNESS. "The amount of my _engagedness_" sounds as well
and is as proper as "the amount of my _indebtedness_." We have already
_hard-heartedness_, _wickedness_, _composedness_, and others.
Nevertheless, this making of nouns out of adjectives with the
participial form is an irruption over the boundaries of the parts of
speech which should not be encouraged.

Archbishop Whately, in a passage of his shortcoming comments on
Bacon's "Essays," uses _preparedness_. Albeit that brevity is a
cardinal virtue in writing, a circumlocution would, we think, be
better than a gawky word like this, so unsteady on its long legs. In
favor of _indebtedness_ over others of like coi