er, who is a lover of languages
for their spirit, to pass the words of untravelled excellence, proper to
their own garden enclosed, without recognition. Never may they be
disregarded or confounded with the universal stock. If I would not so
neglect _piuttosto bruttini_, how much less a word dominating
literature! And of such words of ascendancy and race there is no great
English author but has abundant possession. No need to recall them. But
even writers who are not great have, here and there, proved their full
consciousness of their birthright. Thus does a man who was hardly an
author, Haydon the painter, put out his hand to take his rights. He has
incomparable language when he is at a certain page of his life; at that
time he sate down to sketch his child, dying in its babyhood, and the
head he studied was, he says, full of "power and grief."

This is a phrase of different discovery from that which reveals a local
rhyme-balanced epigram, a gracious antithesis, taking an intellectual
place--_Felice chi vi mira_--or the art-critic's phrase--_piuttosto
bruttini_--of easy, companionable, and equal contempt.

As for French, if it had no other sacred words--and it has many--who
would not treasure the language that has given us--no, not that has given
us, but that has kept for its own--_ensoleille_? Nowhere else is the sun
served with such a word. It is not to be said or written without a
convincing sense of sunshine, and from the very word come light and
radiation. The unaccustomed north could not have made it, nor the
accustomed south, but only a nation part-north and part-south; therefore
neither England nor Italy can rival it. But there needed also the senses
of the French--those senses of which they say far too much in every
second-class book of their enormous, their general second-class, but
which they have matched in their time with some inimitable words. Perhaps
that matching was done at the moment of the full literary consciousness
of the senses, somewhere about the famous 1830. For I do not think
_ensoleille_ to be a much older word--I make no assertion. Whatever its
origin, may it have no end! They cannot weary us with it; for it seems
as new as the sun, as remote as old Provence; village, hill-side,
vineyard, and chestnut wood shine in the splendour of the word, the air
is light, and white things passing blind the eyes--a woman's linen, white
cattle, shining on the way from shadow to shadow. A wor