erties of thought itself. It
is this intimate, immediate, indissoluble connection and correlation
between mind and language, between human thought and human speech,
between the soul itself and the mould into which it is cast, that gives
such importance to the general class of studies known as philological.

The study of language, more than any other study, tends to make the mind
acute, discriminating, and exact. It tends also, in a most especial
manner, to fit a person to train the minds of others to acuteness,
discrimination, and exactness. The person who has learned to express a
thought with entire exactness and idiomatic propriety in two languages;
or where, from the want of analogy between the two languages, he finds
this impracticable, to perceive the exact shade of difference between
the two expressions; who can trace historically and logically the
present meaning of a word from its original starting-point in reason and
fact, and mark intelligently its gradual departures and their causes;
who can perceive the exact difference between words and phrases nearly
synonymous, and who can express that difference in terms clear and
intelligible to others,--that person has already attained both a high
degree of intellectual acumen himself, and an important means of
producing such acumen in others.

The study of language is, in the profession of teaching, like the
sharpening of tools in the business of the mechanic. Words are the
teacher's tools. Human knowledge, even before it is expressed, and as it
is laid up in the chambers of the mind, exists in words. We think in
words. We teach in words. We are qualified to teach only so far as we
have learned the use and power of words.

XI.

CULTIVATING THE VOICE.

If we except the lower kinds of handicraft, nine-tenths of all that is
done in the world is done by means of the voice,--by talking. It is by
talking we buy and sell; by talking, the lawyer, the doctor, the
minister, the teacher perform the chief of their functions; by talking,
the intercourse and machinery of life are chiefly kept in motion. As it
was by a word that creation was accomplished, as the worlds came into
being and were moulded into shape, not by the hand, but by the omnific
voice of God, _saying_, "Let there be light and there was light," so in
this lower sphere of human action, the tongue is mightier than the hand.
The moulding, propelling forces of society come from the use of words.
By words