LITMIR.BIZ

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      So in the Knightes Tale:

      Oh! what an overflowing fulness of truth and beauty is there wrapped up in the core of these articulations that we so heedlessly utter, would we but make use of the wizard's wand wherewith to evoke them! What an exhaustless wealth does there lie in even the humblest fruitage and flowerage of language, and what a fecundity have even dry 'roots'!

      'Thinkest thou there were no poets till Dan Chaucer?' asks our great Thomas; 'no heart burning with a thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word for – what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor, and bold questionable originality. 'Thy very ATTENTION, does it not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO?' Fancy that act of the mind which all were conscious of, which none had yet named – when this new 'poet' first felt bound and driven to name it! His questionable originality and new glowing metaphor was found adoptible, intelligible; and remains our name for it to this day.'4

      This seems to be a pet etymology of Carlyle, as he makes Professor Teufelsdröckh give it to us also.

      Nor less of a poet was that Grecian man who first named this beauteous world – with its boundless unity in variety – the κὁσμος,5 the order, the adornment. But

      and

      that first induced some luckless mortal to give to certain mysterious compounds the appellation of cosmetics! But here is an atonement; for even in our unmythical, unbelieving days, the god 'Terminus' is made to stand guard over every railway station! Again, how finely did the Roman call his heroism his 'virtus' – his virtue – his manliness. With the Italians, however, it became quite a different thing; for his 'virtu' is none other than his love of the fine arts (these being to him the only subject of manly occupation), a mere objet de vertu; and his virtuoso has no more virtuousness or manliness about him than what appertains to being skilled in these same fine arts. With us, our 'virtue' is … well, as soon as we can find out, we will tell you.

      By the way, in what a bathos of mystery are most of our terms expressing the moral relations plunged! Some philosophers have declared that truth lies at the bottom of a well; – the well in which the truth in regard to these matters lies would seem to stretch far enough down – reaching, in fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted – so overloaded by the vain works (and words) of man's device – as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable contradictions has this word (and, more unfortunately still, the thing itself along with it) been enveloped! According to the 'divines,' what does it not signify? Its composition, we very well know, gives us pœnitentia, from pœnitere, to be sorry, to regret– and such is its true and only meaning. 'This design' (that of the analysis of language in its elementary forms), says Wilkins, 'will likewise contribute much to the clearing of some of our modern differences in religion; by unmasking many wild errors, that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases; which being philosophically unfolded, and rendered according to the genuine and natural importance of words, will appear to be inconsistencies and absurdities.' Nor would he have gone very far astray had he put philosophy and politics under the same category. Strip the gaudy dress and trappings from an expression, and it will have a most marked result. Analysis is a terrible humiliation to your mysticism and your grandiloquence – and an awful bore to those who depend for effect on either. We have something to say hereafter on those astonishingly profound oracles whose only depth is in the terminology they employ. In the mean time, expect not too much of words. Never, in all our philologic researches, must we lose sight of the fact that words are but the daughters of earth, while things are the sons of heaven. This expecting too much of words has been the fruitful source of innumerable errors. To resume:

      Take a dozen words (to prove our generosity, we will let it be a baker's dozen) illustrative of this same principle of metaphor that governs the mechanism of language, and sheds a glory and a beauty around even our every-day fireside words; so that even those that seem hackneyed, worn out, and apparently tottering with the imbecility of old age – would we but get into the core of them – will shine forth with all the expressive meaning of their spring time – with the blush and bloom of poesy —

      and prove their very abusers – poets.

      The 'halcyon' days! What a balmy serenity hovers around them – basking in the sunlight of undisturbed tranquillity. This we feel; but how we realize it after reading the little family secret that it wraps up! The Ἁλκυὡν (halcyon) —alcedo hispida– was the name applied by the Greeks to the kingfisher (a name commonly derived from Ἁλς, κυλ, i. e., sea-conceiving, from the fact of this bird's being said to lay her eggs in rocks near the sea); and the ἁλκκυονἱδες ἡμἑραι —halcyon days– were those fourteen 'during the calm weather about the winter solstice,' during which the bird was said to build her nest and lay her eggs; hence, by an easy transition, perfect quietude in general.

      Those who have felt the bitter, biting effect of 'sarcasm,' will hardly be disposed to consider it a metaphor even, should we trace it back to the Greek σαρκἁζω —to tear off the flesh (σαρξ), literally, to 'flay.' 'Satire,' again, has an arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, lost this idea of a melange, and acquired the notion of a poem 'directed against the vices and failings of men with a view to their correction.'

      Perhaps we owe to reviewing the metaphorical applications of such terms as 'caustic,' 'mordant,' 'piquant,' etc., in their burning, biting, and pricking senses.

      But 'review,' itself, we are to regard as pure metaphor. Our friend 'Snooks,' at least, found that out; for, instead of re-viewing —i. e., viewing again and again his book, they pronounced it to be decidedly bad without any examination whatever. A 'critic' we all recognize in his character of judge or umpire; but is it that he always possesses discrimination – has he always insight (for these are the primary ideas attaching themselves to κρἱνω, whence κριτικὁς comes) – does he divide between the merely arbitrary and incidental, and see into the absolute and eternal Art-Soul that vivifies a poem or a picture? If so, then is he a critic indeed.

      How perfectly do 'invidiousness' and 'envy'6 express the looking over against (in-video) – the askance gaze– the natural development of that painful mental state which poor humanity is so subject to! So with 'obstinacy' (ob-sto), which, by the way, the phrenologists represent, literally enough, by an ass in a position which assuredly Webster had in his mind when he wrote his definition

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