Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/263

 English language; and those who have not made the experiment will be surprised when they do so, to find, on the one hand, the readiness and facility that may soon be acquired in going through with them; and on the other, the productive consequence of such methods: for, not only do they confer upon the mind a command of language, and not only do they generate a habit of nice discrimination, as to the sense of words, and their real dependence, but they put it (and this is our immediate purpose) into ready communication with the material universe, in all its innumerable aspects, and store the imagination with vivid conceptions of whatever is cognizable to the senses. It belongs to another department of our educational system to insist upon the fact, which I have already alluded to, and will here again offer to the reader’s consideration, that a comprehensive, well digested, and practised acquaintance with the concrete portion of any one language, amazingly facilitates the acquirement of another, or of several, in conjunction. The well-assorted descriptive terms of our own language, vividly associated with the qualities they 1ndicate, become, as one might say, so many points of concretionof crystallization, around which the equivalent terms of any other language assemble, with the celerity

and certainty, almost, of a chemical process; for, while the abstract terms of a language are open to ambiguities, preventing the fixed convertibility of one language into another, the concrete, expressive as they are of the impressions made upon the human mind, in all times and countries, by the unchanging qualities of the material world are far more constant, and better defined. And it is a circumstance deserving of regard, in this connexion, that the lower we descend toward the nice shades of difference between one quality and another, the more fixed are the terms, in all languages, that are employed to mark them.