a little help ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and
what it was not, if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing out
of, and unfolding itself from, a root, and according to a necessary
law--that root being the divine capacity of language with which man was
created, that law being the law of highest reason with which he was
endowed: if we liken it to this rather than to the rearing of a house,
which a man should slowly and painfully fashion for himself with dead
timbers combined after his own fancy and caprice; and which little by
little improved in shape, material, and size, being first but a log
house, answering his barest needs, and only after centuries of toil and
pain growing for his sons' sons into a stately palace for pleasure and
delight.

Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive man, we should then
find savage tribes, furnished scantily enough, it might be, with the
elements of speech, yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings,
its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close
inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant
and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress
of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more
fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When
wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against
light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been
scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the
world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its
remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one
spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that
expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has
been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have
dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus