ers cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it:
if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it
would utterly be contemned.'

'The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold.'

'Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the
land that is very far off.'

'And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert
from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.'

When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, those rhythms for its
dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. Just there I find
the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the lame to leap. Wyclif,
Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The
Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national
style, thinking and speaking. It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so
harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humble
men of heart like Isaak Walton or Bunyan--have their lips touched and
speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars,--Milton, Sir Thomas
Browne--practice the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms of our
Bible they, too, fall back. 'The great mutations of the world are acted,
or time may be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the
Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but immortality.' The
precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly
clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this
'Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the sound of a trump
our Lord has gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as
it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in
everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

What madman, then, will say 'Thus or thus far shalt thou go' to a prose
thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years,
working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its
range, whether of thought or of music? You have received it by
inheritance, Gentlemen: it is yours, freely yours--to direct your words
through life as well as your hearts.

LECTURE VII

SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED

Thursday, May 29

Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a footnote to my last lecture. It
ended, as you may remember, upon an earnest appea