Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY.379race, wherein matter was most completely permeatedby mind. The language which they usedeven yet presents a very perfect image of such arace, as not being formed from the corruption ofother idioms, but a mother tongue, the most brilliantof the Aryan sisters. In its union of strengthwith beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense,in its power to convey the most subtle distinctionsof philosophic thought, or the most radiant imagesof sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations oflaw, or the tender est dreams of romance, it waswell calculated to be the organ of a people whereinbodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated.The language which we use ourselves isfull of nerve and vigor, with a certain northernforce and a habit of appropriating the materialstores of other languages by incorporating theirwords, which suits well the descendants of sea-kings, who have provinces all over the world; butt is without inflexions, deprived of cases and grs defective in markinin all these is most rich and flexible:time whereas the Grethe one resemblesthe torso of a Hercules without its limbs,the other an Apollo as he touches the earth in hisperfect symmetry. Then compare its sound withthat of the old Hellenic tongue, C 7 and we seem tothe poet's "stridor ferri tractseque cbeside the voice of a lute: while as to texture, itis like the train of a railway matched with thgolden network, fine as the spider's web, indig