Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/193

 torment; others are like winged arrows shot at shining marks; some are poisoned barbs that kill, others the brutal bludgeons that bruise and stun; some are the demons that torture; and others are the good angels that sustain and soothe.

If anything in this world has a spirit it is a word; if anything has a mission it is a word; if anything has power for good or evil it is a word. Words are beings that inhabit some mysterious dimension; they come to us unbidden; they will not endure capture, for they die in slavery. Words which we calmly search out and appropriate often prove to be corpses; they no longer can serve the mind as swift and competent messengers of thought and feeling, but they seem made for ideas that are moribund; they are vehicles for the dead; they are hearses driven by sombre undertakers; others are dead bodies unburied; we may wrap them in gaudy rags but they remain the lifeless things of idle show.

Words are gregarious and clannish; some