us, and are by some regarded as scarcely raised
in refinement and sensibility above the rank of the more polished
domestic animals of our own great and enlightened land, we should often
find them replete with the choicest elements of the truly epic, the
comic, and the tragic.

How seldom do the people of different lands and languages learn to
understand each other--become so well acquainted as to appreciate each
other's most engaging traits? The German emigrant seeks a home among us,
and desires to identify himself with us. The costume of his native
district is thrown off as soon as he needs a new garment, often much
sooner. His language is laid aside except for domestic use and certain
social and business purposes, as soon as he has a few words of ours.
These words serve the ends of business, and rarely does he ever learn
enough for any other purpose. The other parts of the man remain
concealed from our view. He is to us a pure utilitarian of the grossest
school. His pipe suspended from his mouth, his whole time given to his
shop, his farm, or his garden, and to certain amusements unknown to us,
he is deemed to vegetate much like the plants he grows, or to live a
life on the same level with that of the animal he feeds, incapable of
appreciating those higher and more refined pleasures to which we have
risen--in other words, the true type of dulness and coarseness. An
intelligent Welshman once told me that he could not talk religion in
English nor politics in Welsh. So with the Germans among us. Their
business and politics learn to put themselves into English, their
religious, domestic, and social being remains forever shut up in the
enclosure of their mother tongue, and from this we rashly judge that
what they express is all there is of them. We have never considered the
difficulty of transferring all the utterances of humanity from their
first and native mediums to foreign ones. It is easy to learn the daily
wants of life or the formal details of business in a new language. Here
words have a uniform sense. But the nice shades and turns of thought
which appear in the happiest and most delicate jets of wit and humor,
and which form the great staples of pleasant social intercourse, depend
upon those subtile discriminations in the sense of words which are
rarely acquired by foreigners. One may have all the words of a language
and not be able to understand them in sallies of wit. How nicely
adjusted then must be the scales