Page:Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect.pdf/79

Rh dition to its bare indication of meaning, words and phrases carry with them an enveloping suggestiveness and an emotional efficacy. This function of language depends on the way it has been used, on the proportionate familiarity of particular phrases, and on the emotional history associated with their meanings and thence derivatively transferred to the phrases themselves. If two nations speak the same language, this emotional efficacy of words and phrases will in general differ for the two. What is familiar for one nation will be strange for the other nation; what is charged with intimate associations for the one is comparatively empty for the other. For example, if the two nations are somewhat widely sundered, with a different fauna and flora, the nature-poetry of one nation will lack its complete directness of appeal to the other nation—compare Walt Whitman’s phrase,

for an American, with Shakespeare’s

. . . this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,’

for an Englishman. Of course anyone, American or English, with the slightest sense for history and kinship, or with the slightest sympathetic