receive it, if you have anything better to say than this. Nor shall I wonder if you have something to say better; for you seem to me to have considered things of this kind yourself, and to have learned them from others. Should you, then, say anything better, write me down as one of your disciples respecting the meaning of Words."

RAMBLE SECOND.

THE WORK OF THE SENSES.

"Speech is the perfect expression of the Senses. Words are but the representations of the disintegrated body of Man."

OKEN.

SYDNEY SMITH has somewhere an amusing passage illustrative of the radical sensualism that underlies our most supersensual terms, wherein alluding to our æsthetic application of such expressions as 'taste,' 'tact' (from the Latin verb to touch), 'eye,' etc., he observes that we will doubtless soon come to speak of a man with a fine 'nose' for this or that province of physics or philosophy.

Extravagance aside, the Senses have certainly left their seal and superscription, sharp, unmistakable, on the words of our language. The rôle they fill in the body forthshadows their part and play in speech. Roots of man's nature-outlets and inlets of the world -their vivid, strong-flavored presentings run spinelike through language. 'SENSIBLE' is but a lively condition of the senses or feelings, 'APATHY' is want of feeling 'GUSTO' is an idealization of rich juicy taste 'TACT' is delicacy of touch, the 'TANGIBLE' is what can be touched 'RANK' and 'NASTY' have both a far-off genesis in terms implying the nose-and 'ACUTENESS' is properly just sharpness of hearing. How copiously, too, has the Eye contributed! 'CIRCUMSPECTION,' for instance, is a careful looking (specio) around on all sides (circum), hence mental wariness'PERSPICUOUS' is what is readily to be seen throughand 'ENVY' finely seizes that askance look which is the natural manifestation of this passion.

Everywhere man finds himself. Himself, himself! He darts responsive rays to nature. Civilization is but the crystallization into fact of the human faculties and functions. The practical arts are but an expanded Hand: telescope and microscope are realizations of the structure of the Eye: he adds boots of swiftness to his feet in railroads and steam navigation: and his nervous system is repeated, after sublime proportions, in the electric threads with which he is now reticulating the planet.

All words are primarily sympathetic. Words are born of a passionate yearning. And it is through the Senses that the mind goes out to nature: these the filaments and outreachings-these the subtle threads that link phenomena and the mind. I find an impressive testimony to this primary law of language in the word 'THOUGHT.' Evidently enough it is an abstraction from the verb to think (Saxon, thencan, past part. thoht), which Horne Tooke* deduces from thing-I am thing-ed, Me thinketh, that is Me thingeth-precisely analogous to the Latin 'REOR' from resderivations that may intimate the extent to which things color thoughts.

It is an interesting illustration of how intellectual conceptions are but a translation of sensible perceptions that the word 'WITS' was formerly used as synonymous with 'SENSES,' a meaning which we can appreciate from the phrase, to be 'OUT OF ONE'S WITS,' that is, to be out of one's senses. It also intimates a curious piece of metaphysics: as though the sole 'source' of wit and wisdom were through the avenues of the senses. In Chaucer I find the following instance of its employment:

"Thou hast don sinne again oure Lord Crist, for certes the three enemies of mankind, that is to sayn, the flesh, the fend, and the world, thou hast suffred hem entre into thin herte wil

* Diversions of Purley, p. 608.

fully by the windowes of thy body, and hast not defended thyself suffisantly agein hir assautes and hir temptations, so that they han wounded thy soule in five places, this is to sayn, the dedly sinnes that ben entred into thyn herte by thy five wittes," etc.

Tale of Melibeus.*

And how terribly does this passage find realization in our 'SENSUAL,' that is, a devotion of all the powers to the service of the senses-a devotion, which Goethe has embodied with such terrific power in the creation of Mephistophiles.

On the other hand, what a noble redemption is found in the word 'SENSE,' which simply means feeling, as though only a man of feeling were a man of 'sense.' And certes between the man of noble heart and he of great good sense, there is a close enough connection. To what lofty statement of this thought did Swedenborg rise in his august and oracular utterance that "the quality of one's life is the quality of his love!" And perhaps there is a profounder veracity than we might be apt to suppose in the old maxim: Quantum sumus scimus. At least it might do us no harm to have a little more faith in heart-tellings and a little less in the mere dictates of mortality.

* Tyrwhitt's Chaucer, vol. ii. p. 284.