“Words,” said the fierce Mirabeau, in reply to an opponent in the National Assembly, “are _things_;” and truly they were such when _he_ thundered them forth from the Tribune, full of life, meaning and power. Words are always things, when coming from the lips of a master-spirit, and instinct with his own individuality. Especially is this true of so impassioned orators as Mirabeau, who have thoughts impatient for words, not words starving for thoughts, and who but give utterance to the spirit breathed by the whole Third Estate of a nation. Their words are not merely things, but _living_ things, endowed with power not only to communicate ideas, but to convey, as by spiritual conductors, the shock and thrill which attended their birth. Hazlitt, fond as he was of paradox, did not exaggerate when he said that “words are the only things that live forever.” History shows that temples and palaces, mausoleums and monuments built at enormous cost and during years of toil to perpetuate the memory or preserve the ashes of ancient kings, have perished, and left not even a trace of their existence. The pyramids of Egypt have, indeed, escaped in some degree the changes and chances of thousands of years; yet an earthquake may suddenly engulf these masses of stone, and “leave the sand of the desert as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea shore.” A sudden accident may cause the destruction of the finest masterpieces of art, and the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvedere, or the Venus de Medicis, upon which millions have gazed with rapture, may be hopelessly injured or irretrievably ruined. A mob shivers into dust the statue of Minerva, whose lips seemed to move, and whose limbs seemed to breathe under the flowing robe; a tasteless director of the Dresden Gallery removes the toning of Correggio’s “Notte,” where the light breaks from the heavenly child, and deprives the picture of one of its fairest charms; an inferior pencil retouches the great Vandyck at Wilton, and destroys the harmony of its colors; and though no such mishap as these befall the product of the painter’s skill, yet how often,--
“When a new world leaps out at his command, And ready nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colors soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just shade and light; When mellowing years their full perfection give And each bold figure just begins to live. The treacherous colors the fair art betray, And all the bright creation fades away.”