ou do not speak the
Italian language, ask yourself whether Dante comes as close to you as
Shakespeare, all questions of genius and temperament apart. And if Dante
seems a thousand miles away, and Shakespeare enters into your closest
chamber, is it not first of all because the language of Shakespeare is
your own language, alive with the life that is in your own tongue, vital
with your own ways of thought and even tricks and whims of speech? Let
English die, and Shakespeare goes out of your closet, and passes away
from you, and is then your brother-Englishman only in name. So close is
the bond of language, so sweet and so mysterious.

But there is yet a more sacred bond with the language of our fathers
when it can have no posthumous life in books. This is the bond of love.
Think what it is that you miss first and longest when death robs you of
a friend. Is it not the living voice? The living face you can bring back
in memory, and in your dark hours it will shine on you still; the good
deed can never die; the noble thought lives for ever. Death is not
conqueror over such as these, but the human voice, the strange and
beautiful part of us that is half spirit in life, is lost in death. For
a while it startles us as an echo in an empty chamber, and then it is
gone, and not all the world's wealth could bring one note of it back.
And such as the vanishing away of the voice of the friend we loved is
the death of the old tongue which our fathers spoke. _It is the death of
the dead_.

MANX SUPERSTITIONS

When the Manx tongue is dead there will remain, however, just one badge
of our race--our superstition. I am proud to tell you that we are the
most superstitious people now left among the civilised nations of the
world. This is a distinction in these days when that poetry of life,
as Goethe names it, is all but gone from the face of the earth. Manxmen
have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon and the stars, and the
mist of the mountains and the wail of the sea. Of course we are ashamed
of the survival of our old beliefs and try to hide them, but let nobody
say that as a people we believe no longer in charms, and the evil eye,
and good spirits and bad. I know we do. It would be easy to give you a
hundred illustrations. I remember an ill-tempered old body living on
the Curragh, who was supposed to possess the evil eye. If a cow died at
calving, she had witched it. If a baby cried suddenly in its sleep,
the old witch must hav