He put his acorn helmet on; It was plumed of the silk of the thistle-down. Was once the wild bee's golden vest; His cloak, of a thousand mingled dyes, His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen, Studs of gold on a ground of green; And the quivering lance which he brandished bright Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in fight. Swift he bestrode his fire-fly steed; He bared his blade of the bent-grass blue; He drove his spurs of the cockle-seed, And away like a glance of thought he flew, Up to the vaulted firmament His path the fire-fly courser bent, He flies like a feather in the blast Till the first light cloud in heaven is past. Up to the cope careering swift, In breathless motion fast, Fleet as the swallow cuts the drift Or the sea-roc rides the blast, Oh, it was sweet, in the clear moonlight, . To meet the thousand eyes of night And feel the cooling breath of heaven! But the elfin made no stop or stay Till he came to the bank of the milky-way; Then he checked his courser's foot, And watched for the glimpse of the planet-shoot. [He is successful in his object, and on his return the joyous sprites thus welcome him:] Ouphe and goblin! imp and sprite! Elf of eve! and starry fay! Ye that love the moon's soft light, Sing and trip it merrily, Hand to hand, and wing to wing, Round the wild witch-hazel tree. Hail the wanderer again With dance and song, and lute and lyre; And doubly bright his fairy fire. Brush the dew and print the lea; The beetle guards our holy ground; He hums in his ears and flaps his face; The leaf-harp sounds our roundelay, The owlet's eyes our lanterns be: Thus we sing, and dance, and play, But hark! from tower on tree-top high Shapes of moonlight! flit and fade! THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. W. D. WHITNEY. [The science of philology, which has elicited so many profound and admirable treatises in recent times from the scholars of Europe, has also had ardent students in America, whose work bears fair comparison with that of their European competitors. Among these Professor Whitney stands at the head, his philological labors being nowhere surpassed in depth, accuracy, and scientific value. We append a short extract from his "Language and the Study of Language," mainly as illustrative of his style. William Dwight Whitney was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1827. His diligent philological labors in American and German universities brought him the professorship of Sanskrit and comparative philology at Yale College, which he still holds. He has written several works and many periodical articles, all marked by learning, judgment, and clear insight into his subject.] WE may fairly claim, in the first place, that the subject has been very greatly simplified, stripped of no small part of its difficulty and mystery, by what has already been proved as to the history of speech. Did we find no traces 273 of a primitive condition of language different from its later manifestations,-did it appear to us as from the very beginning a completely-developed apparatus, of complicated structure, with distinct signs for objects, qualities, activities, and abstract conceptions, with its mechanism for the due expression of relations, and with a rich vocabulary, then might we well shrink back in despair from the attempt to explain its origin, and confess that only a miracle could have produced it, that only a superhuman agency could have placed it in human possession. But we have seen that the final perfection of the noblest languages has been the result of a slow and gradual development, under the impulse of tendencies and through the instrumentality of processes which are even yet active in every living tongue; that all this wealth has grown by long accumulation out of an original poverty; and that the actual germs of language were a scanty list of formless roots, representing a few of the most obvious sensible acts and phenomena appearing in ourselves, our fellowcreatures, and the nature by which we are surrounded. We have now left us only the comparatively easy task of satisfying ourselves how men should have come into possession of these humble rudiments of speech. And our attention must evidently first be directed to the inquiry whether those same inventive and shaping powers of man which have proved themselves capable of creating out of monosyllabic barrenness the rich abundance of inflective speech were not also equal to the task of producing the first poor hoard of vocables. There are those who insist much on what they are pleased to term the divine origin of language; who think it in some way derogatory to the honor of the Creator to deny that he devised roots, and words, and, by some miraculous and exceptional agency, put them ready-made into the mouths. II.-S of the first human beings. Of such we would ask whether, after all, language can be in this sense only a divine gift to man; whether the hand of the Creator is any the less clearly to be seen, and need be any the less devoutly acknowledged, in its production, if we regard man himself as having been created with the necessary impulses and the necessary capacities for forming language, and then as having possessed himself of it through their natural and conscious workings. Language, articulate speech, is a universal and exclusive characteristic of man; no tribe of human kind, however low, ignorant, and brutish, fails to speak; no race of the lower animals, however highly endowed, is able to speak: clearly, it was just as much a part of the Creator's plan that we should talk as that we should breathe, should walk, should eat and drink. The only question is, whether we began to talk in the same manner as we began to breathe, as our blood began to circulate, by a process in which our own will had no part; or, as we move, eat, clothe, and shelter ourselves, by the conscious exertion of our natural powers, by using our divinely-given faculties for the satisfaction of our divinely-implanted necessities. That the latter supposition is fully sufficient to account for our possession of speech cannot with any show of reason be denied. Throughout its whole traceable history, language has been in the hands of those who have spoken it, for manifold modification, for enrichment, for adaptation to the varying ends of a varying knowledge and experience; nineteenth-twentieths, at the least, of the speech we speak is demonstrably in this sense our own work why should the remaining twentieth be thought otherwise? It is but a childish philosophy which can see no other way to make out a divine agency in human language than by regarding that agency as specially and |