struction visible is a language little fitted
for the more advanced mental processes; that its images are material; and
that, on the other hand, a certain spiritualizing and subtilizing effect
of alien derivations is a privilege and an advantage incalculable--that
to possess that half of the language within which Latin heredities lurk
and Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and security
of a dead tongue, without the death.

But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in
origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase. The most beautiful
and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare.
"Superfluous kings," "A lass unparalleled," "Multitudinous seas": we
needed not to wait for the eighteenth century or for the nineteenth or
for the twentieth to learn the splendour of such encounters, of such
differences, of such nuptial unlikeness and union. But it is well that
we should learn them afresh. And it is well, too, that we should not
resist the rhythmic reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the
Latin. Such a reaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day. We
want to quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want the
poise and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong
movement expresses it. And not the phrase only but the form of verse
might render us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with
a touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for
his son. But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of
submission on the part of the writer. The couplet transgressed against,
trespassed upon, used loosely, is like a law outstripped, defied--to the
dignity neither of the rebel nor of the rule.

To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction which the very
closeness of the emotion taking us by the heart makes necessary. Shall
not the Thing more and more, as we compose ourselves to literature,
assume the honour, the hesitation, the leisure, the reconciliation of the
Word?

THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

Dialect is the elf rather than the genius of place, and a dwarfish master
of the magic of local things.

In England we hardly know what a concentrated homeliness it nourishes;
inasmuch as, with us, the castes and classes for whom Goldoni and Gallina
and Signor Fogazzaro have written in the patois of the Veneto, use no
dialect at all.

Neither Goldoni nor Gal