lect of
fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons
put together.'

You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage is
expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he uttered
it vividly.

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a
passage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay
within South's compass:--

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it
distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest
not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine
eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the
dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust
of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those
dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble
flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the
death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say
_This is Iesabel_; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it
should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, _This is
Iesabel._

Carlyle noted of Goethe, 'his emblematic intellect, his never-failing
tendency to transform into _shape_, into _life_, the feeling that may
dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet's
imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns
them into shape.'

Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down to
my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of
Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so
trivial as the choice between abstract and definite words.

A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than language; for
language (as in a former lecture I tried to preach to you) is your
reason, your [Greek: logos]. So long as you prefer abstract words, which
express other men's summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which
as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand
material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at
second-hand. If your