is gain of our best glory shall be sent,
To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?
What worlds in the yet unformed Occident
May come refined with the accents that are ours?
Or who can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained?
What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,
What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained,
What mischief it may powerfully withstand,
And what fair ends may thereby be attained"?

{37} _Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache_, Berlin, 1832, p. 5.

II

GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as _living_, of
others as _dead_. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class;
for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less
modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as
to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as
it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show
itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition,
loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which
abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is
by living men, a _vital_ formative energy is still at work. It is one
which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates
it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it
anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources,
increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless
and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it
finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign
and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I
would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make
mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which
were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the
acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it
sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which
were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not
perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, of
disorganization, decay, and ultimate death; but still it lives, and even
these misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this good,