Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/116

 very reason new combinations become possible; and the language, which never is, but eternally is becoming, does not speak itself, but he who wishes to use it must speak it himself in his own fashion and creatively for his own needs. The latter undoubtedly demands far more diligence and practice than the former. Similarly, the investigations of a people with a living language go down, as we have already said, to the root where ideas stream forth from spiritual nature itself; whereas the investigations of a people with a dead language only seek to penetrate a foreign idea and to make themselves comprehensible. Hence, the investigations of the latter are in fact only historical and expository, but those of the former are truly philosophical. It is quite plain, too, that an investigation of the latter kind may be completed sooner and more easily than one of the former.

So we may say that genius in foreign lands will strew with flowers the well-trodden military roads of antiquity, and weave a becoming robe for that wisdom of life which it will easily take for philosophy. The German spirit, on the other hand, will open up new shafts and bring the light of day into their abysses, and hurl up rocky masses of thoughts, out of which ages to come will build their dwellings. The foreign genius will be a delightful sylph, which hovers in graceful flight above the flowers that have sprung of themselves from its soil, settles on them without causing them to bend, and drinks up their refreshing dew. Or we may call it a bee, which with busy art gathers the honey from the same flowers and deposits it with charming tidiness in cells of regular construction. But the German spirit is an eagle, whose mighty body thrusts itself on high and soars on strong and well-practised wing into the empyrean, that it may rise nearer to the sun whereon it delights to gaze.