Nor is
it merely that the old and the familiar will often become new in the
poet's hands; that he will give the stamp of allowance, as to him will
be free to do, to words which hitherto have lived only on the lips of
the people, or been confined to some single dialect and province; but
he will enrich his native tongue with words unknown and non-existent
before--non-existent, that is, save in their elements; for in the
historic period of a language it is not permitted to any man to do more
than work on pre-existent materials; to evolve what is latent therein,
to combine what is apart, to recall what has fallen out of sight.
But to return to the more deliberate coining of words. New necessities
have within the last few years called out several of these deliberate
creations in our own language. The almost simultaneous discovery of
such large abundance of gold in so many quarters of the world led some
nations so much to dread an enormous depreciation of this metal, that
they ceased to make it the standard of value--Holland for instance did
so for a while, though she has since changed her mind; and it has been
found convenient to invent a word, 'to demonetize' to express this
process of turning a precious metal from being the legal standard into
a mere article of commerce. So, too, diplomacy has recently added more
than one new word to our vocabulary. I suppose nobody ever heard of
'extradition' till within the last few years; nor of 'neutralization'
except, it might be, in some treatise upon chemistry, till in the
treaty of peace which followed the Crimean War the 'neutralization' of
the Black Sea was made one of the stipulations.
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