And Tristram, fondling her light hands, replied, "Grace, Queen, for being loved: she loved me well. Did I love her? the name at least I loved. And Isolt answered, "Yea, and why not I? Mine is the larger need, who am not meek, Pale-blooded, prayerful. Let me tell thee now. Here one black, mute midsummer night I sat Lonely, but musing on thee, wondering where, Murmuring a light song I had heard thee sing, And once or twice I spake thy name aloud. Then flash'd a levin-brand; and near me stood, In fuming sulphur blue and green, a fiend— Mark's way to steal behind one in the darkFor there was Mark: 'He has wedded her,' he said, Not said, but hiss'd it: then this crown of towers Then Tristram, ever dallying with her hand, "May God be with thee, sweet, when old and gray, And past desire!" a saying that anger'd her. And sweet no more to me!' I need Him now. Would that have chill'd her bride-kiss? Wed- Becomes thee well-art grown wild beast thy ded her? Fought in her father's battles? wounded there? self. How darest thou, if lover, push me even And solemnly as when ye sware to him, VOWS The King prevailing made his realm:—I say, Then Tristram, pacing moodily up and down, "Vows! did ye keep the vow ye made to Mark More than I mine? Lied, say ye? Nay, but learnt, The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself— My knighthood taught me this-ay, being snapt We run more counter to the soul thereof Than had we never sworn. I swear no more. eyes, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate: And hear the garnet-headed yaffingale Mock them my soul, we love but while we may; : And therefore is my love so large for thee, Here ending, he moved toward her, and she "Good: an I turn'd away my love for thee The golden beard that clothed his lips with This knightliest of all knights, and cast thee light Moreover, that weird legend of his birth, Believed himself a greater than himself, VOWS First mainly thro' that sullying of our Queen- back Thine own small saw 'We love but while we may,' Well then, what answer ?" He that while she spake, So then, when both were brought to full She rose, and sat before him all he will'd; They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and Now mocking at the much ungainliness, And craven shifts, and long crane legs of Mark— Of our old Kings; whence then? a doubtful Then Tristram laughing caught the harp, and lord sang: Ay, ay, O ay-the winds that bend the brier! s! A star in heaven, a star within the mere ! Then in the light's last glimmer Tristram show'd And swung the ruby carcanet. She cried, Grown on a magic oak-tree in mid-heaven, He rose, he turn'd, and flinging round her neck, Claspt it; but while he bow'd himself to lay Warm kisses in the hollow of her throat, Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch'd, Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek"Mark's way," said Mark, and clove him thro' the brain. That night came Arthur home, and while he climb'd, All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom, A voice clung sobbing till he question'd it, BOOK REVIEWS AMERICANISMS; THE ENGLISH OF THE NEW WORLD. By M. Schele de Vere, LL.D., Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Virginia, author of "Studies in English," etc. New York: Chas. Scribner & Co. It seems that both Mr. Marcy, the United States Secretary of State, and the Czar of Russia, when in a towering rage against England, ordained that the “English” language should be superseded in documents by the "American" language; a proof, perhaps, that demagogic despots are as liable to outbreaks of silly and undignified passion as despots of the ordinary kind. The term American," as applied to themselves by the people of the United States, is, moreover, a usurpation against which all the other inhabitants of the Continent have a right to protest. If a language distinct from that of England has been formed in the States, let it be called Yankee : or if that name is wanting in dignity, by some other name which correctly denotes the fact. Large additions have undoubtedly been made to the English language in the United States. Of these additions Dr. de Vere gives a very full and interest ing account, classifying them under twelve heads, which are the titles of his chapters :-"The Indian," "Immigrants from Abroad, The Great West, ""The Church," "Politics," "Trade of all kinds," "Afloat," "On the Rail," "Natural History," “Old Friends (old English words) with New Faces," "Cant and Slang," "New Words and Nicknames." The Indians, like other exterminated races, have left melancholy monuments of themselves in the names of the great landmarks. But they may also be said to have given a few words to the language. Yankee itself is now allowed to be Yengee, the Indian mispronunciation of English. The headquarters of the Democratic party in New York are their wigwam, and Tweed is their Sachem as well as their “Boss.” Tammany was the seat of an ancient Indian chief, who, it seems, was party to a sale of the territory which is now Rhode Island, on terms very like the Tammany contracts of modern times. Pow-wow has also pretty well effected a lodgment in the language. Of the immigrants, the Dutchman has given be sides plenty of local names (including Bowery, now the Alsatia of New York, but "once the pleasant Bouvery or garden-bower of Dutch governors"), some general words; e. g., overslaugh (from overslaan to skip) for preferring an outsider over the heads of those entitled by seniority. A more familiar instance is boss from the Dutch baas, an overseer. that source. "I suppose to die in this State, until he has paid $10 for a new pair of boots with which to kick the bucket. Section 2. Any Chinaman dying under this Act shall be buried six feet under ground. Section 3. Any Chinaman who attempts to dig up another Chinaman's bones, shall first procure a license from the Secretary of State, for which he shall pay $4. Section 4. Any dead Chinaman who attempts to dig up his own bones, without giving due notice to the Secretary of State, shall be fined $100." the Queen is your boss now," said a Yankee stagedriver to Lord Carlisle. "I did not boss the job, it was sister," cried a Yankee child five years old, when he wanted to charge his sister with being the aggressor in a quarrel. The French words are not many; but prairie and sault (now pronounced soo) are from Some French local names appear in strange masquerade: Bois Brûlé is Bob Ruly, Chemin Couvert is Smack Cover, Rivière du Purgatoire is Picketwire. With plenty of French fashions, some French phrases have also found their way. A Confederate soldier who was picked out of a ditch, where he lay apparently dead, at Gettysburgh, told General Lee that he was not hurt or scared, but "terribly demoralized." The Spaniard has contributed negro, mulatto, quadroon, and its bastard derivative octoroon. He seems also to have contributed filibuster, the verb of which has now the political sense of manoeuvring to delay a final vote. More Spanish words, such as ranche, a farm, and stampede (estampida) are coming from California and New Mexico. The German, though he has added so vast an element to the population, has not added, according to Dr. De Vere, a dozen important words to the language, so rapidly has he been absorbed into Yankeedom. One well-known German word is lager: while loafer (läufer) expresses the dislike of an industrious people for those who lead an irregular and unsettled life. From the negro come Buckra, and indirectly marooning, which originally denoted the life of a runaway negro in the wilds, but is now used for picnicking. The Negro English, however, is a dialect of itself, and has acquired through the negro minstrelsy a place in literature. Dr. de Vere goes so far as to say that "America owes the negro no small gratitude for the only national poetry which it possesses, as distinct from all imitation of old English verses and all competition with the English writers of our day." The Chinaman is bringing in a little Canton jargon, such as first-chop for first-rate; and kootoo, or kowtow, low bowing, is a Chinese word. But the introduction of Chinese words and of the Chinaman himself will be difficult while the feeling of the people in the West against him remains what it is now. Dr. de Vere cites a set of resolutions which he says were actually moved, though not carried, in the Legislature of Oregon in 1870. "Be it enacted by the Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon:-Section 1. No Chinaman shall be allowed 66 'The Great West," says Dr. de Vere, "has impressed the stamp of its own life even more forcibly (than New England) in the speech of its sons. Everything is on such a gigantic scale there that the vast proportions with which the mind becomes familiar, beget unconsciously a love of hyperbole, which in its turn irresistibly invites to humour. Life is an unceasing activity there, and hence speech also is racy with life and vigour. All is new there to those who come from older countries or crowded cities, and hence new words are continually coined, and old ones receive new meanings; nature is fresh and young there, and hence the poetic feeling is excited, and speech assumes unconsciously the rhythm and the elevation of poetry." From the chapter which follows, and from our own experience of Western talk, we should say that humorous hyperbole, rather than elevated poetry, was the characteristic of the West. Land settling has produced some terms, humorous but not poetic. "Any man who has married a lively blonde, and sees himself reflected in two blue eyes, has thereby made himself sure of heaven, having preempted two quarter-sections of it and settled on the same." Locate has been the unhappy parent of a line of similar barbarisms, such as orate and donate, culminating, or rather reaching the lowest abyss, in vocate and missionate. The terms derived from pioneer life are legion: Stump oratory is among them, and so, we presume, is axe-grinding. To save, i. e., to make safe by shooting dead, is, it seems, a term of frontier hunting and warfare. calculate, Mr. Hossifer (officer) that war the most decisivest and the most sanguinariest fight you ever seen in all your born days, We boys, we up and pitched in thar and we give the yaller bellies the most particular Hail Columby. We chawed 'em all up; we laid 'em out colder nor a wedge; we saved every mother's son of 'um-we did that 'ar little thing, boss." Honey-fugling, used for kissing by the classic lips of Susan B. Anthony, is a term, it seems, of Western bee-hunting. A question having been propounded by a philological enquirer in Harper's Monthly as to the meaning of the phrase, the answer was, "It is cutting it too fat over the left." "I The language of the New England Church, as well as the temper of the New Englander, bears traces of the fact that with the Puritans "antagonism was the normal condition of life." The great object was to differ in phraseology, as well as in customs, from the old country. The peculiar extravagances of religious enthusiasm in the new world, have also produced some new terms, such as jerks for religious convulsions. The terms Hard Shell Baptists, and Soft Shell Baptists, grotesquely denote one instance of the universal disintegration, which, under the action of liberalizing influences, is taking place in all the Churches of the United States from the Episcopalian to the Quaker. Mormonism and Spiritualism are the latest sources of religious additions, if religious additions they can be called, to the English of the New World. From politics have come a host of terms, all of them vulgar, and almost all of them denoting something tricky and roguish. The political vocabulary of our neighbours is pretty well known here. Our readers may, however, be glad to be informed that the term gerrymandering, denoting the fraudulent division of a State into districts, so as to give the party which has the minority in number a majority of the votes, is derived from the name of its inventor, Mr. Elbridge Gerry, a prominent politician of the State now adorned by General Butler. Buncombe, log-rolling, lobbyiug, land-grabbing, ballot-box stuffing, repeating, ring, are too well known. Pipelaying is less familiar; it was derived from a scheme for importing voters from Philadelphia into New York, which was concealed under the form of a contract for laying water-pipes from the Croton aqueduct. The etymology of the caucus, which under the system of party government, has practically superseded the constitutional legislature, is lost in philological night. The term has been wildly derived from scyphus, a divining cup! A pincher is "a bill which promises to secure a pecuniary reward to those who are interested in its defeat." A rooster (our cousins are too delicate to say cock) is “a bill which will benefit the legislators, and no one else." The vocabulary is of course rich in new terms for illicit gains, chickenfe being one of the latest. We knew what wirepulling was, but we did not know that peculiar skill in it was called sculduggery. To crawfish is equivalent to ratting in English. Sound on the goose seems to baffle etymology; but it means sound on the main question. Highfalutin is equally puzzling to the philologist, who desperately struggles to find a derivation for it in high-flying, high-floating, and even in the Dutch verlooten-to flay by whipping. SpreadEagleism, on the contrary, calls for no philological As a practical illustration of its meaning Dr. de Vere gives an extract from the Report of Legislative Proceedings in Indiana-"The American people and we are proud to call ourselves that-are research. rocked in the bosom of two mighty oceans, whose granite-bound shores are whitened by the floating canvass of the commercial world; reaching from the ice-fettered lakes of the north to the febrile waves of Australian seas, comprising the vast interim of five billions of acres, whose alluvial plains, romantic mountains and mystic rivers rival the wildest Utopian dreams that ever gathered round the inspired bard, as he walked the Amaranthine promenades of Hesperian gardens, is proud Columbia, the land of the free and the home of the brave." Free soil, free labour and free love are terms of which the first two are pregnant with evil memories of the past, while the last is full of evil omen for the future. Skedaddle, a word of the civil war, has been pretty well incorporated into the slang portion of the English language. etymology seems to be satisfactorily traced to the Scotch or Scandinavian language, in both of which the word means to spill water or milk from a pail. "Trade of all kinds has, of course, contributed its quota. Dr. de Vere has the candour to admit that "if the English are a nation of shop-keepers, the Americans are not unmindful of the same source of wealth." He, however, charges to the account of England the phrase Almighty Dollar, begging Englishmen to recall the first lines of Ben Jonson's epistle to the Countess of Holland : : "Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold, And almost every vice, almightie gold." Its But the omnipotence of gold, though not of greenbacks, has been the complaint of all lands and ages. "Money itself," says Dr. de Vere, has in the United States, as in England, more designations than any other object, liquor alone exeepted." He admits, however that the English Slang Dictionary does not comprise John Davis, Ready John, spondulics, dooteroomus or doot, tow, wad, hardstuff or hard, dirt, shinplasters, wherewith, shad scales, or scales, dyestuffs, charms, stamps. Bogus is rather unexpectedly derived from the noble Italian name Borghese, borne by an itinerant drawer of fictitious notes, checks and bills of exchange, whose genius merited a monument in our language since he succeeded in swindling Yankee smartness out of large sums. Skinning is resorted to whenever the merchant is short; and short is a word of large significance and 'great practical utility. "A common practice is to withhold a little of a poor sewing-girl's pay from week to week, on the plea of being short, and when a handsome aggregate has been reached, to boldly deny the debt." As to the vocabulary of liquors and liquoring, we really must disclaim for the backward and torpid old country anything like rivalry with the foremost of nations. |