g
freaks in which nature sometimes indulges, and which proved how
anomalous was his temperament, he would utter quite simply ideas of
which the depth was not revealed to me till a long time after.

"Often," he has said to me when speaking of his studies, "often have I
made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down the abyss of
the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of grass tossing on the
ripples of a stream. Starting from Greece, I would get to Rome, and
traverse the whole extent of modern ages. What a fine book might
be written of the life and adventures of a word! It has, of course,
received various stamps from the occasions on which it has served its
purpose; it has conveyed different ideas in different places; but is it
not still grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul,
body, and motion? Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its
functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into
an ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored by the idea they
represent? Then, to whose genius are they due? If it takes great
intelligence to create a word, how old may human speech be? The
combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to the
word, are the exact reflection, in accordance with the character of each
nation, of the unknown beings whose traces survive in us.

"Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to
thought, from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic
presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to
written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series
of images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the
hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing
human ideas as embodied in the forms of animals that gave rise to the
shapes of the first signs used in the East for writing down language?
Then has it not left its traces by tradition on our modern languages,
which have all seized some remnant of the primitive speech of nations,
a majestic and solemn tongue whose grandeur and solemnity decrease as
communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew Bible,
and still are noble in Greece, but grow weaker under the progress of
successive phases of civilization?

"Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying
buried in every human word? In the word _True_ do we not discern a
certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the co