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ince are they?' 'Deira,' said the merchant. De ira!' said Gregory; then they must be delivered from the wrath'-in Latin de ira-'of God.' 'And what is the name of their king?' ‘Ælla.' 'Ella! then Alleluia shall be sung in his land.' Presently Roman missionaries bearing a silver cross with an image of Christ came in procession chanting a litany. In the council of the king, the High-Priest of Odin declared that the old gods were powerless:

For there is no man in thy land, O King, who hath served all our gods more truly than I, yet there be many who are richer and greater, and to whom thou showest more favor; whereas, if our gods were good for anything, they would rather forewarn me who have been so zealous to serve them. Wherefore let us hearken to what these men say, and learn what their law is; and if we find it to be better than our own, let us serve their God and worship Him.'

This is the profit-and-loss estimate-not yet extinct among us of things divine, contracting the horizon of life within the narrow circle of material interests. But in that assembly of wise men was another, of finer mould, whose eyes, lifted from the dust, could see the stars. Then a chief rose and said:

You remember, it may be, O King, that which sometimes happens in winter when you are seated at table with your earls and thanes. Your fire is lighted, and your hall warmed, and without is rain, snow, and storm. Then comes a swallow flying across the hall; he enters by one door and leaves by another The brief moment while he is within is pleasant to him: he feels not rain nor cheerless winter weather; but the moment is brief, the bird flies away in the twinkling of an eye, and he passes from winter to winter. Such, methinks, is the life of man on earth, compared with the uncertain time beyond. It appears for a while; but what is the time which comes after the time which was before? We know not. If then, this new doctrine may teach us somewhat of greater certainty — whence man cometh and whither he goethit were well that we should regard it." 1

Henceforth the war-gods are blotted out, the passions which created them wane; manly and moral instincts increase; new ideas take root; and a literature begins whose inspiration and soul, even to the latest generation, while it images the mingled and many-colored web of mortal experience, are essentially the God-idea-this longing after an Infinite which sense cannot touch, but reverence alone can feel - this wonder and sorrow concerning life and death which are the inheritance of the Saxon soul from the days of its first sea-kings.

In this year (597),' says the Chronicle, Gregorins the Pope sent into Britain Augustinus with very many monks who gospelled God's word to the English folk. That is, they preached or taught, the Gospel· -the good spell or tale, the good news of what God had done for others and would do for them.

Though the Christian faith had not failed among the Britons of Wales, the British priests were not likely to try to convert their mortal enemies, the Anglo-Saxons, nor were the latter likely to listen to them. The Scots (Irish) helped much in the good work afterwards, but had nothing to do with it in the beginning.

Results.-The English people, it is thus seen, is a composite nation, uniting in its children the elements which, separately, in the intellectual development of Europe, have shown themselves most efficient in all great and worthy achievements. But of this British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman blood, in fulfilment of the decrees of an overruling Providence, is formed the English nation—a nation that has preserved its free spirit under foreign domination and domestic oppression-a nation that has upheld, with ever increasing strength, the principle that power is derived from the governed for the general good-a nation that in literature and life has furnished the moral pioneers and teachers of the world. Its body, its substance, is Saxon, which receives first the Celt, with his bold imagination and self-sacrificing zeal; then the Dane, with his tacit rage and adventurous maritime spirit; then the Norman, with his flexible genius, his trickery, his subtlety, his drawing-room polish, and his keen sense of enjoyment. Herein consists its true greatness, which comes of no transfusion,-its energetic sense of truth, its assertion of the right of individual liberty, its resolute habit of looking to the end, its deep power of love and its grand power of will.

We may therefore expect from this blending of diverse parts a many-sided intellectual progress and a wide variety of individual character, the multifariousness of Shakespeare, the austerity of Milton, the materialism of Spencer, the transcendentalism of Emerson, the grace of Addison, the solidity of Johnson, the oddity of Swift, the sadness and madness of Byron.

CHAPTER II.

FORMING OF THE LANGUAGE.

Words are the sounds of the heart.-Chinese Proverb.
Words are the only things that live forever.-Hazlitt.

Definition.-Speech is the utterance of sounds which usage has made the representatives of ideas. When, in any community, the same sounds are customarily associated with the same ideas, the expression of these sounds by the speaker renders his ideas intelligible to the hearer.

Man possesses in the organs of utterance-though he seldom thinks of it, or forgets the blessing because it is given-a musical instrument which is at once a harp, an organ, and a flute; an instrument on which Nature gives him the mastery of a finished performer. How its notes are struck, so as to express in coördination the many-colored world without and the shadowworld within, is the mystery of language. This, however, is the observed phenomenon: a person having a thought, and wishing to awaken a corresponding thought in the mind of another, emits, at stated intervals, a portion of his breath, modified by certain movements of the vocal organs; these movements are transmitted to the atmosphere, and thence to the ear of the listener, producing there vibrations identical with the original; then, through the agency of instinct, memory, and invention, the two have the same thought. A result reached without any conscious effort, and therefore seemingly simple and commonplace, yet seen, on reflection, to be truly wonderful. Short as is the reach of its pulse, vanishing as are its undulations, by that fluid air, articulated into living words, man graves on the rock or prints in the book the records of his outward history and his inner soul, in symbols more enduring than Babylonian palace or Egyptian pyramid.

Origin. Whether man was the special creation of God or was developed from inarticulate creatures, it would seem evident

that speech, in its inception, like the bark of a dog, is a natural product, and hence originates in the instinct divinely implanted, directly, or indirectly, in man's nature to communicate thought.' The Providence that provided soil, fuel, minerals, and vegetables, to meet his physical needs, and religion to meet his spiritual demands, would, it is reasonable to expect, furnish at the outset suitable means of communication.

We must suppose, however, that what is known to be true in other directions of his development will be found to be true in this, an imperfect beginning and a gradual ascent. Clothing began with leaves and bark, with skins of wild animals and the like; shelter was first a hole in the ground, or the hollow of a tree; tools were first of bone, wood, or stone: but in time the sheltering cave became a nest of interwoven branches, this, in many ages, a log hut, and this, by'improvement in shape, material, and size, after centuries of toil, a stately palace; in long ages of cultivation, dress-making and tool-making became arts, each giving us forms of elegance and beauty. When first the infant is moved to express itself to others, it does so by motions or natural cries, then by simple words of one syllable- very few in number, for its ideas are few-progressing slowly in its powers of utterance, yet increasing its vocabulary as intelligence. expands.

So, by analogy, was it with man. His beginning was less a song or a poem than a cry or gesture. His first words, like those of the child, were probably monosyllables, and, like those of the child or savage, referred mainly to his bodily wants and to surrounding objects which impressed him strongly.

The origin of speech-so mysterious is the power-excited some speculation even among the rude primeval races. The Esthonians tell that the Aged One, as they call the Deity, placed on the fire a kettle of water, from the hissing and bubbling of which the various nations learned their languages; that is, by imitating these vague sounds, they modulated them into intelligible utterances. The Australians explain the gift of speech by saying that people had eaten an old woman, named Wururi, who

1 Man is not less divine, nor his speech less God-given, on the supposition that he has been evolved from lower organisms: for still an adequate Cause-à Supreme Intelligence must have impressed such attributes upon primordial matter as to make such evolution possible.

Wururi

went about at night quenching fires with a damp stick. is supposed to mean the damp night-wind, and the languages learned from devouring her are the guttural, or wind-like, reproduction of natural sounds made by the material objects around them. There is the beautiful legend that Wannemunume, the god of song, descended into a sacred wood, and there played and sang. The birds learned the prelude of the song; the listening trees, their rustle; the streams, their ripple and roar; and the winds, their shrill tones and desolate moans: but the fish remained dumb, because, though they protruded their heads, as far as the eyes, out of the water, their ears continued under water, and they could only imitate the motion of the god's mouth. Man alone grasped it all, and so his song pierces down into the depths of the heart and up into the home of the gods.

Development.-Two principles have been especially active in the growth of speech:

1. Onomatopoeia, or sound-imitation. Thus the cry of a cat to children of different nationalities is e-you; the watch is ticktick. Thus, also, the interjection ah or ach gives the root aka (Sanskrit), acam (Anglo-Saxon), and thence our ache; whence also anxious, anguish, and agony. The root mur in murmur, implying the rush of water-drops, gives myriad. The Australian, imitating the noise it makes, calls the frog kong-kung. The North American Indian, repeating the hooting of the bird, calls the owl kos-kos-koo-oo, a verbal sign which immediately suggests to all who have heard it, the thing signified. Several tribes on the coast of New Guinea give names to their children in imitation of the first sound the child utters. Familiar instances of inventing names by imitating natural sounds, are whip-poor-will, peewee, bob-white, buzz, whiz, hiss, snap, snarl, bang, roar. There is the story of the Englishman who, wanting to know the nature of the meat on his plate at a Chinese entertainment, turned to the native servant behind him, and, pointing to the dish, inquired, 'Quack, quack?' The Chinaman replied, 'Bow-wow.' Thus the two were mutually intelligible, though they understood not a word of each other's language.

2. Metaphor, or the use of words in new applications.When a strange object is seen, men are not satisfied till they have heard its name. If it has none, as would happen in the

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