Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/115

 to the test of a sort of comparative estimate, as thus:—

England is a sea-girt land, and it is a land of rivers, and streams, and springs, and brooks, and lakes, and pools, and ponds, and canals, and ditches: it is also a land in which rural employments and out-of-doors habitudes prevail: it is a country in which the mass of the people has lived much abroad, and has dwelt amidst humidity. Nevertheless fifty or sixty words exhaust the vocabulary of the English tongue in this watery department. More than this number are not easily producible, either from our writers, or from colloquial usage. With this number our poets have contented themselves, from Chaucer to these times. France is also a sea-girt land, and it is well watered; but its vocables of this class are not more in number than our own. But now, although a portion only of the language of the Hebrew people has come down to us in the canonical books, this portion brings to our knowledge as many as fifty words of this one class: it is not to be doubted that in the colloquial parlance of the people many more words had place;—as many, probably, as would fully sustain our affirmation as to the comparative copiousness of this tongue. In allowing sixty words of this class to the English language, many are included which are technical or geographical, rather than natural or colloquial, and which are rarely occurrent in literature—seldom, if ever, in religious writings. Such are the words