“Could I embody and unbosom now That which is most within me,--could I wreak My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, All that I would have sought, and all I seek, Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe,--into one word, And that one word were lightning, I would speak; But, as it is, I live and die unheard, With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.”
So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:
“I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal, And half conceal the soul within.”
De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician’s heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.
“The sea of thought is a boundless sea, Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach; The waves that would tell of the mystery Die and fall on the shore of speech.”
“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “is vast as the air; it embraces far more than languages can express;--or rather, languages _express_ nothing, they only make thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions, which the intellect combines and marshals with lightning-like rapidity.”
The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons who have conception without expression,--gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such men they term men of “passive genius.” Their minds are like black glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “the dumb ones of earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of high import, but are speechless when they would tell them. The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent; for there are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them, however “well-languaged” the thinker may be.