Such a currency there is, a
currency intellectual and spiritual of no meaner worth, and one with
which we have to transact so much of the higher business of our lives.
Let us take care that we come not in this matter under the condemnation
of any such incurious indifference as that which I have imagined.
LECTURE V.
ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.
If I do not much mistake, you will find it not a little interesting to
follow great and significant words to the time and place of their birth.
And not these alone. The same interest, though perhaps not in so high a
degree, will cleave to the upcoming of words not a few that have never
played a part so important in the world's story. A volume might be
written such as few would rival in curious interest, which should do no
more than indicate the occasion upon which new words, or old words
employed in a new sense--being such words as the world subsequently
heard much of--first appeared; with quotation, where advisable, of the
passages in proof. A great English poet, too early lost, 'the young
Marcellus of our tongue,' as Dryden so finely calls him, has very
grandly described the emotion of
'some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken.'
Not very different will be our feeling, as we watch, at the moment of
its rising above the horizon, some word destined, it may be, to play
its part in the world's story, to take its place for ever among the
luminaries in the moral and intellectual firmament above us.
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