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ink in that golden chain by which it is bound to our deepest sympathies and highest imaginations.

Talfourd is the author of two other tragedies, which have less merit and celebrity than "Ion "—"The Athenian Captive," and "Glencoe." Both are well written, and if produced by any other man than the author of "Ion," would be justly esteemed as evincing considerable dramatic power, force of thought, and fineness as well as strength of imagination. But their intrinsic excellence is underrated from their being tried by the standard which their elder brother established. "Glencoe," in particular, is a noble drama, replete with grandeur and beauty of sentiment and expression, and displaying much skill in the delineation of character.

The exuberance of imagination and sensibility which Talfourd manifests in all his compositions, seems to indicate that his true vocation is poetry. In kindly feeling, in genial sympathy with his race, in that running over of the heart in the worship of all that is great and good in character and life, in all those qualities which mark the musing and imaginative poet, he is perhaps not excelled by any contemporary. Still, with a nature which seems so singularly fitted for the quiet pursuits of literature, his life thus far must have been somewhat practical. He is a distinguished lawyer and politician. His literary productions have been conceived and executed in the pauses of active professional business. He is one of those authors against whom we never bring the complaint of having written too much. Indeed, we wish that he would abandon other avocations, and devote himself wholly to letters. This wish, as generally ap plied, we know is nothing more than a sickening expres. sion of mawkishness and hypocrisy; but in the case of

Talfourd, it springs directly from the heart of every reader who has drawn delight and mental nourishment from his writings. We rather grudge the hours which poets of his class devote to more worldly duties. We magine we have a moral claim upon their souls, and hardly acknowledge their right to give their powers any other direction than what seems at once to be their natural tendency, and to minister to our highest pleasures. If, however, our author should not add one line to what he has already written, his name is sure to be warmly cherished by those to whom his works have been pleasant and profitable companions, with familiar faces ever beaming with benignity and sinlessness; whose love of moral and intellectual excellence he has kindled or elevated; and who can pardon an occasional paradox or fallacy, when it springs from a desire to vindicate the intrinsic nobleness of the poet's vocation, and is associated with such high moral principle, and so many valu. able and soul-animating truths.

WORDS.

WORDS, we are told, are the signs of ideas. This definition, at best, is faulty, and, in a majority of cases, untrue. Nothing is more common than to see words without any sign of ideas at all. Besides, those who understand the nature of language, and wield uncontrolled dominion over all its powers, have been careful to tell us that the true use of words is not to express, but to conceal, ideas. Words, moreover, are of such inherent value in themselves, and in the concerns of the world exercise such untrammelled influence, that it is unjust to degrade them from sovereigns into representatives. It would be much more modest for lovers of definition to say, not that words are, but that they should be, the signs of ideas. The moralist is more philosophical. He distinguishes carefully between qualities and their application. He defines the laws of ethics, and informs us that men should obey them, - not that they do.

The true ruler of this big, bouncing world is the Lexicon. Every new word added to its accumulated thousands is a new element of servitude to mankind. We should therefore look sharply at all axioms which seem to fix the signification of these little substantives and sovereigns. The notion that they are the signs of thought can be disposed of without any train of tedious

* American Review, February 1845.

argument; because the originators and defenders of that notion are found inconsistent, when we unite any two of their propositions. For instance, the remark is often heard, that certain words in certain connections are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Now, if words be full of sound, they must necessarily be sound words; and if words are the signs of ideas, sound words must represent sound thoughts. Here is a logical dilemma for these axiomatic gentlemen.

Indeed, words, in themselves, are nothing more than "mouthfuls of spoken wind," the sons and daughters of the tongue and lungs. They are hardened into consistency by a process of pens, ink, and paper. In this state they take form. But naturally they are immaterial substances, like thoughts. The sculptor embodies an idea in marble, and we discriminate between the essence and the form. Why should we not also distinguish between a word printed or written, and a word spoken or conceived, — between the body and the soul of an expulsion of air? Words, in truth, are entities, real existences, immortal beings; and, though I would not go the whole length of Hazlitt, in saying that they are the only things that live forever, I would vindicate their title to a claim in the eternities of this world, and defend them from the cavils of presumption and ignorance.

Shakspeare, speaking through Lorenzo, regrets, with much feeling, the thickness of ear which prevents us from drinking in the music of the spheres. But how much more, in a moral and intellectual point of view, should we lament that hard condition of our faculty of hearing, by which we are prevented from enjoying all the sweet noises of the past, and compelled to hear only the harsh gutturals of the Jresent. Every disturbance

of the atmosphere, caused by the ejection of a word, does not cease with our perception of it, but is everlastingly active. All around us now are the words of Noah, and Moses, and Plato, and Socrates, and Shakspeare, and Milton; and if our ears were only delicate enough to convey the sounds into our minds, we might hear, with our outward organ, Plato converse on the soul's immortality, Socrates gravel a sophist with his interrogative logic, Shakspeare sting Ben Jonson or Master Decker with a joke worthy of Thersites, and Milton ask Quaker Ellwood to read Homer to him, or rebuke his daughters for unkindness and inattention. The air is a more faithful chronicler of words than books. Every whisper of wickedness which has fallen from the white lips of a tyrant or murderer, and which has never passed into but one human heart, is still alive in the air, and circling the earth in company with the song of Miriam, and the invectives of Luther, and the low prayer of Ridley, and the scoff of D'Holbach, and the profaneness of Rochester, and the denunciations of Burke. Truly are we surrounded with Voices. The sacredness and awful responsibilities of speech, the latent importance of idle words, - consist in their ever-present existence. No sound that goes from the lip into the air can ever die, even in a sensual sense, until the atmosphere which wraps our planet in its huge embrace has passed into nothingness. Words, then, have a being of their own; they exist after death, or rather they continue to exist after all memory of them has departed from the minds. into which they originally entered.

Leaving, however, these lofty notions of words, and coming down to the every-day world of books and men, we observe many queer developments of the cozenage of

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