The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in learning languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we have Indian ones, and I believe that more French and Latin was introduced through the pen and the eye than through the tongue and the ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be decided by reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period before or since,--and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.[123] The language has gained immensely, by the infusion, in richness of synonyme and in the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but more than all in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the music of verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in _sweat_ and _perspiration_; but there are vastly more in which the Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question between the old English _again-rising_ and _resurrection;_ but there can be no doubt that _conscience_ is better than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than _again-bite_. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's famous ode, "Intimations of Immortality," into "Hints of Deathlessness," it would hiss like an angry gander. If, instead of Shakespeare's
"Age cannot wither her, Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"
we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the high Roman fashion of such togated words as
where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more vividly than the famous phrase of Aeschylus does its rippling sunshine? Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell felt, when he wrote,
for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid was _buxom_, but we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of _bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[124]