last many hours,
and be full of such successive measurements, each marked by
a spun thread of web. But the true circle itself within
which the web was spun, the circle in actual space as the
geometer knows it, would its nature be thus a series of
events, a mere succession of spun threads? No, the true
circle would be timeless, a truth founded in the nature of
space, outlasting, preceding, determining all the weary
web-spinning of this time-worn spider. Even so we, spinning
our web of experience in all its dreary complications in the
midst of the eternal nature of the world-embracing
substance, imagine that our lives somehow contain true
novelty, discover for the substance what it never knew
before, invent new forms of being. We fancy our past wholly
past, and our future wholly unmade. We think that where we
have yet spun no web, there is nothing, and that what we
long ago spun has vanished, broken by the winds of time into
nothingness. It is not so. For the eternal substance there
is no before and after; all truth is truth. 'Far and forgot
to me is near,' it says. In the unvarying precision of its
mathematical universe, all is eternally written.

'Not all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out one word of it.'"

Foreign Words.

Words and phrases from a foreign language should be used only as a
last resort. _Bon mot, sine qua non,_ and _dolce far niente_ are all
very apt, and to a person like Mr. Lowell, who was intimately
acquainted with many languages, they may come as soon as their English
equivalents. In the case of such a person, the reason why they should
not be used is that the reader cannot understand them. But when a
young smatterer uses them to advertise his calling acquaintance with a
language, he is but proclaiming his own lack of good taste. In his
composition they are as ineffective to make it respectable as a large
diamond on a gamester's finger to make him an honored gentleman. Use
the English language when writing for English-speaking people. It has
the fullest, richest vocabulary in the world. It will not be found
unequal to the task of expressing your thoughts.

Words in Present Use.

Third, words should be in present use. Words may be so new that people
do not know them; they may have passed out of use afte