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ART. II. THE ENGLISH TONGUE A NEW SPEECH.

By FRANCIS A. MARCH, Prof. of the English Language and Comparative Philology, Easton, Pa.*

His mother tongue is the scholar's true foster mother. She takes him as soon as the light of consciousness shines in his eyes; teaches him how to analyse and name the indefinite apparitions of sense; leads him on to reason, and supplies him. with instruments; moulds his passions and sentiments to sympathy with the great hearts and souls whose words of fire she loves to repeat; raises his religious feelings to supernatural elevation by her utterance of the revealed Word; and ever present to his consciousness, like the light which surrounds us, or the air we breathe, or the blood in our own proper veins, quickens us, develops us, leads us, serves us with an ever active attention which may be fitly compared to the providence of God. We are about to speak of the English language, our most noble foster mother; and what we have to say is in the form of an illustration of the proposition that the English is a new speech. A new speech! It is not, as it used to be called, a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Norman. It is not, as it is now pronounced by Teutonic scholars, a development of AngloSaxon. In opposition to the mixture doctrine, it is a living unity, an organic whole; having its final causes within itself, its laws peculiar to itself, its beauty of part, its beauty as a whole; its vitality, growth, and symmetry. In opposition to the development statement, it is a new being. It is not the Anglo-Saxon grown. It may be called a son of Saxon and Norman parents. But then it should be said that this son is a genius. Some sons are only copies of their father or mother;

* This article was prepared for an oration before the Society of the Alumni of Amherst College, at the Commencement of 1860; and is now printed as delivered, with an occasional change of the form of address. It is hoped this may sufficiently explain its peculiarities of style.

but this son is a Shakspeare, whose wonderful gifts come from neither father nor mother. And it should further be said that it is the founder of a new line, and not the flower of an old race. Its look is to the future, not to the past. The Greek had its genius, sovereign, unapproachable. It is the foremost and the greatest of the languages of its class. It has a peculiar quality and flavor, the mysterious vitality and charm which belong to the rarest favorites of nature. But the Greek is the flower of the Indian languages. It is many-doubled, lustrous, fragrant, but the stamens and pistils are all turned into petals. It will bear no seed, will have no successor. Such a language could never be spoken except by such a people; and such a people could not live except in such a country, beneath that clear sky, within hearing of those laughing waters. There could be no hope of daughters more beautiful than this most beautiful mother. It is a possession for all time, but only for the choice spirits of all time. It may be felt by those who love it, but its historical position can be understood only from the side of the Sanskrit, and the kindred eastern dialects. The qualities which are strangest to us are those which are common to the East-the abundance, the flexibility, the smoothness, the flow. In these qualities it is surpassed by the Sanskrit; it is identical in kind, and surpassed in degree. It is like the eastern serpent, winding, involved, many-jointed, flexible, smooth, brilliant in color; or a tropical forest, with its palms and vines and flowers interlocked and interwreathed, but shot through to its depths with the sunlight. Seen from our side, these seem miracles of nature; from the eastern side, they are the common heritage of the Arian race. The Greek is the bright consummate flower of the Eastern languages, not the tough seed whence new forests were to spring in the West.

What we have said of the Greek is true of the German, the flower of Teutonic tongues; and of the French, the flower of Romance languages; but the English looks to the future, not to the past. The Teutonic hen which hatched this eagle's egg looks with increased amazement at the gnarled muscles, the talons, the beak, the terrible eye of this proud bird, and cackles

confusedly at his scream. He looks to the future, the true lord of nations.

As an element in history, then, when we compare its relations to the past and to the future, the English language stands forth as new.

This is not the place to develop a complete classification of languages, and assign its place to the English with scientific precision.

We proceed, however, to characterize it as well as we can. And we begin with the very general statement that it is the most analytic of languages. Language, like knowledge, begins with the indefinite, and proceeds by analysis to the more definite. Sound is still more indefinite than speech. Sound seems to be an original function of matter, already from its creation prophesying and prepared for the hearing ear and the human soul which were to come after so many ages. In sound, as in so many other respects, there is seen a resemblance in the progress of the world to the growth of a man. In the infancy of the earth, before ever a crust was spread over its fluid mass, it lay hushed in the murmurs of a myriad ripples and dimples, the most indefinite of possible sounds.

It used to be the habit in our college days to spend summer evenings on the chapel steps, watching the glories of the setting sun, and the coming on of twilight. As the sounds of day died away, and the college and town were whist, there used to arise in the dusk a faint, low murmur, like the rustling of the garments of night, swelling gently, falling away into silence, never loud, never distinct. Whether it was some strange vibration about the buildings, the soughing of the evening air in pine trees, or the faint murmurs of some far-off stream, we never could agree, and when we heard the President's eloquent discourse, which told us that the universe was one vast sounding-gallery, we were well content to say that our music was what it surely symbolizes the reverberation of the voice of total nature.

*

Lulled by this very strain, the infantile world lay dreaming

*See Religion of Geology, by President Hitchcock, p. 410.

through its early ages-dreaming who knows what prophetic dreams of pine trees in which wind is soughing, of the summer bees and brooks, of the far-off hum of populous cities.

Then came boyhood, which rejoices in the explosive-the banging of guns, the cracking of fire-works; and the hardening shell of the world resounded like a bomb with the bursting of volcanic bubbles, and the far-off rumble of earthquakes. The demiurgus celebrated a long independence day with a perpetual sound of fire-works. Sound was become more

definite.

The animals came in time. Their cries are more definite in their expression than the sounds of lifeless things, but they still speak the whole character or the general wants of the being that utters them, apparently without analysis-the utterance of life, but of life which does not discriminate, of instinct, not of thought. We say apparently without analysis, because we know not how definite the cries of animals are to their own kind. To the ear of man they have the indefiniteness of a strain of music-pleasing, elevating, seeming just on the point of saying what never is heard. "Away! away!” cried Jean Paul's immortal tenant of earth, when he heard the sound of music, "thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have found not, and I shall not find." The poets have been always searching for this secret relation of sound to sense, have always been striving to articulate the song of birds, and the ripple of river or wind. Some philologist perhaps, with a poet's heart, may sometimes catch the key, and tell us what the nightingale sang

"To the sad heart of Ruth,

When sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn;"

put in fitting words the hymn which the wood-thrush caroled for the drooping Audubon, storm-drenched in the primeval forests, when "as the first glimpses of morning gleamed doubtfully among the forest trees, there came upon his ear, thrilling along the sensitive chords which connect that organ with the heart, the delightful music of this harbinger of day," inspiring feelings that were thoughts, and raising the thoughts of the fresh old man to Him who sent the bird.

Finally came man, whom all preceding ages looked for and sung for, gifted with reason and the coördinate power of speech. We shall not enter on the question of the origin of language. It is certain that the world was shapen and fitted up for a hearing and speaking tenant. It is certain that speech is as natural to man as reason. It is plain that the languages with which we are acquainted are in different stages of development. My purpose lies wholly in the open field of science; it is only to show that development proceeds from the indefinite to the more definite. Though our first parents were at once inspired to speak a language for which ages of development would have been needed in the ordinary course of things, it is yet true that a great part of the world now speaks just about such a language as we see must be the natural product of their faculties.

The language of miracle has so long ago been degraded to the level of the savage tribes, that they now speak languages which are substantially adjusted to their unripe reason. Man begins with the indefinite in thought and feeling, with a speech indefinite and unsteady in articulation, indefinite and unsteady in the functions of its words. Every confused volume of sound, in comparison with the parts of speech of refined languages, seems like one of those animals of the lower orders, who are nothing but a cell, a sack-one indefinite mass, where stomach, brain, and limbs are undistinguished, and digestion, sensation, and locomotion are all in the whole, and all in every part. So when man speaks an undeveloped speech, a succession of utterances come forth which are neither noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, nor preposition, neither notional nor relational, but indefinitely all of these.

The speech of the aborigines of America, as described by the earliest observers, may serve as an illustration. These tribes had the senses developed in their highest perfection for observation and imitation; but even abstraction, the first movement of reason, seems to have been in a rudimental state. They could speak of things only as they are found in nature with their relations and surroundings. They could not say tree or house, for example. They must put something in every

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