employ it also with a constant reference
to meaning and veracity; that is, he must be a master of experience
before he can become a true master of words. Nevertheless,
language is primarily a sort of music, and the beautiful effects
which it produces are due to its own structure, giving, as it
crystallizes in a new fashion, an unforeseen form to experience.

Poets may be divided into two classes: the musicians and the
psychologists. The first are masters of significant language
as harmony; they know what notes to sound together and in
succession; they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and
images, by the fugue of passion and the snap of wit, a thousand
brilliant effects out of old materials. The Ciceronian orator, the
epigrammatic, lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art.
The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their effect not by the
intrinsic mastery of language, but by the closer adaptation of it to
things. The dramatic poets naturally furnish an illustration.

But however transparent we may wish to make our language,
however little we may call for its intrinsic effects, and direct our
attention exclusively to its expressiveness, we cannot avoid the
limitations of our particular medium. The character of the tongue a
man speaks, and the degree of his skill in speaking it, must always
count enormously in the aesthetic value of his compositions; no
skill in observation, no depth of thought or feeling, but is spoiled
by a bad style and enhanced by a good one. The diversities of
tongues and their irreducible aesthetic values, begins with the very
sound of the letters, with the mode of utterance, and the
characteristic inflections of the voice; notice, for instance, the
effect of the French of these lines of Alfred de Musset,

Jamais deux yeux plus doux n'ont du ciel le plus pur
Sonde la profondeur et reflechi l'azur.

and compare with its flute-like and treble quality the breadth, depth,
and volume of the German in this inimitable stanza of Goethe's:

Ueber alien Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spuerest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Voegelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Even if the same tune could be played on both these vocal
instruments, the difference in their _timbre_ would make the value
of the melody entirely distinct in each case.

_Syntactical form._

Sec. 43. The known impossibility of adequate translatio