By the way, in what a _bathos_ of mystery are most of our terms expressing the moral relations plunged! Some philosophers have declared that truth lies at the bottom of a well;--the well in which the truth in regard to these matters lies would seem to stretch far enough down--reaching, in fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted--so overloaded by the vain works (and _words_) of man's device--as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable contradictions has this word (and, more unfortunately still, the thing itself along with it) been enveloped! According to the 'divines,' what does it not signify? Its composition, we very well know, gives us _poenitentia_, from _poenitere_, to _be sorry_, to _regret_--and such is its true and _only_ meaning. 'This design' (that of the analysis of language in its elementary forms), says Wilkins, 'will likewise contribute much to the clearing of some of our modern differences in religion; by unmasking many wild errors, that shelter themselves under the disguise of affected phrases; which being philosophically unfolded, and rendered according to the genuine and natural importance of words, will appear to be inconsistencies and absurdities.' Nor would he have gone very far astray had he put _philosophy_ and _politics_ under the same category. Strip the gaudy dress and trappings from an expression, and it will have a most marked result. Analysis is a terrible humiliation to your mysticism and your grandiloquence--and an awful bore to those who depend for effect on either. We have something to say hereafter on those astonishingly profound oracles whose only depth is in the terminology they employ. In the mean time, expect not too much of words. Never, in all our philologic researches, must we lose sight of the fact that _words are but the daughters of earth, while things are the sons of heaven_. This expecting too much of words has been the fruitful source of innumerable errors. To resume: Take a dozen words (to prove our generosity, we will let it be a baker's dozen) illustrative of this same principle of metaphor that governs the mechanism of language, and sheds a glory and a beauty around even our every-day fireside words; so that even those that seem hackneyed, worn out, and apparently tottering with the imbecility of old age--would we but get into the core of them--will shine forth with all the expressive meaning of their spring time--with the blush and bloom of poesy-- 'All redolent with youth and flowers,' and prove their very abusers--poets.