of the real power of language, unless they are
balanced by an opponent list of the words which signally fail of any such
imitative virtue, and whose sound, if one dwelt upon it, is destructive of
their meaning.

2. For instance. Few sounds are more distinct in their kind, or one would
think more likely to be vocally reproduced in the word which signified
them, than that of a swift rent in strongly woven cloth; and the English
word 'rag' and ragged, with the Greek [Greek: rhegnumi], do indeed in a
measure recall the tormenting effect upon the ear. But it is curious that
the verb which is meant to express the actual origination of rags, should
rhyme with two words entirely musical and peaceful--words, indeed, which I
always reserve for final resource in passages which I want to be soothing
as well as pretty,--'fair,' and {171} 'air;' while, in its orthography, it
is identical with the word representing the bodily sign of tenderest
passion, and grouped with a multitude of others,[44] in which the mere
insertion of a consonant makes such wide difference of sentiment as between
'dear' and 'drear,' or 'pear' and 'spear.' The Greek root, on the other
hand, has persisted in retaining some vestige of its excellent dissonance,
even where it has parted with the last vestige of the idea it was meant to
convey; and when Burns did his best,--and his best was above most men's--to
gather pleasant liquid and labial syllabling, round gentle meaning, in

"Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
Will ye go, will ye go,
Bonnie lassie, will ye go,
To the birks of Aberfeldy?"

he certainly had little thought that the delicately crisp final k, in birk,
was the remnant of a magnificent Greek effort to express the rending of the
earth by earthquake, in the wars of the giants. In the middle of that word
'esmarag[=e]se,' we get our own beggar's 'rag' for a pure root, which
afterwards, through the Latin frango, softens into our 'break,' and
'bark,'--the 'broken thing'; that idea of its rending around the tree's
stem having been, in the very earliest human efforts at botanical
description, {172} attached to it by the pure Aryan race, watching the
strips of rosy satin break from the birch stems, in the Aberfeldys of
Imaus.

3. That this tree should have been the only one which "the Aryans, coming
as conquerors from the North, were able to recognize in Hindustan,"[45] and
should therefore also be "the only one whose name is common to Sanskrit,
and to t