When People
Talk To Me About Studying Sanscrit, Or Greek, Or Latin, Or German, Or,
Still More Absurd, French, I Feel As If I Could Fell Them With A Mallet
Happily.
Study the English, and you will find everything there, I reply.
With such a language I fully anticipate, in years to come, a great
development in the power of expressing thoughts and feelings which are
now thoughts and feelings only.
How many have said of the sea, 'It makes
me feel something I cannot say'! Hence it is clear there exists in the
intellect a layer, if I may so call it, of thought yet dumb - chambers
within the mind which require the key of new words to unlock. Whenever
that is done a fresh impetus is given to human progress. There are a
million books, and yet with all their aid I cannot tell you the colour of
the May dandelion. There are three greens at this moment in my mind: that
of the leaf of the flower-de-luce, that of the yellow iris leaf, and that
of the bayonet-like leaf of the common flag. With admission to a million
books, how am I to tell you the difference between these tints? So many,
many books, and such a very, very little bit of nature in them! Though we
have been so many thousand years upon the earth we do not seem to have
done any more as yet than walk along beaten footpaths, and sometimes
really it would seem as if there were something in the minds of many men
quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun and trees and
hills - altogether house people, whose gods must be set in four-cornered
buildings.
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