If you cling to the snobbish notion that common people are prosaic,
ask any common person for the local names of the flowers,
names which vary not only from county to county, but even from
dale to dale.

But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this.
It will be said that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace,
and that the dim democracies of our modern towns at least have lost it.
For some extraordinary reason they have not lost it. Ordinary London
slang is full of witty things said by nobody in particular.
True, the creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as the creed
of the old countryside; but the people are just as clever in giving
names to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys
in the wilderness. One could not better sum up Christianity than by
calling a small white insignificant flower "The Star of Bethlehem."
But then, again, one could not better sum up the philosophy
deduced from Darwinism than in the one verbal picture of "having
your monkey up."

Who first invented these violent felicities of language?
Who first spoke of a man "being off his head"? The obvious comment
on a lunatic is that his head is off him; yet the other phrase is far
more fantastically exact. There is about every madman a singular
sensation that his body has walked off and left the important part
of him behind.

But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even
stronger when they are more vulgar. What concentrated irony
and imagination there is for instance, in the metaphor which
describes a man doing a midnight flitting as "shooting the moon"?