"
VII.
ERRATA.[7]
[7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870.
Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the
soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence
it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a
watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his
pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest
language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into
which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or
abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style
may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers
out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind;
and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its
beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the
transparency and directness of its threads, which are words.
A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his
privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and
phrases,--abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and
written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the
pages, even of good writers.
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