“On ne considère pas assez les paroles comme des faits:” that was well said! Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it represents. If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead consciously; it is like adulterating coin. [Illustration] “Common people,” said Johnson, “do not accurately adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;”—that is to say, they neither apprehend truly nor speak truly—and in this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the “common people.” It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration, equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which people say sometimes “words—words—mere words!” is unthinking and unwise. It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the inner life between man and man: “Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole,” said Montaigne. [Illustration] 70. “We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are surely either bad or mad.” “Or perhaps only sad?” There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the healing power of Nature is felt—even as Wordsworth describes it—felt in the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse, sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us, they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary, thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours. Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living voice responsive in every murmuring stream.