was used of the farmer, who, with his foot or some instrument, carefully pressed home into the earth the seed which he had sown. We see how well the metaphor can be transferred to the process of careful teaching—to the clergyman, for instance, who inculcates religious truth. These are but a few obvious and well-known samples of a process which has gone on in all languages, and has furnished forth our whole stock of names for mental operations and spiritual truths. And Imagination has been the power which has presided over the process, the interpreter mediating between two worlds, and naming the unseen realities of the inner world by analogies which she perceives in them to the sensible objects of the outer. Disciples of the Hume philosophy will see in these facts of language a confirmation of their master’s dictum that all ideas and thoughts are but weak and faded copies of the more vivid impressions first stamped on the senses. But those who have been learners in another school, to whom the world of thought has more power and reality than the world of sense, they will read in these facts a different lesson, that He has made all things double, the one over against the other, and that the thought by which both are pervaded is one. Truly then has it been said, “Language is fossil poetry.” And any one who will set himself to spell out those fossils, and the meanings they contain, will find a wonderful record of the way in which the mind of man has wrought in their formation. This record will lead him down into layers of thought as varied as any which the geologist deciphers, filled with more subtle and marvelous formations than any animal or vegetable fossils. For full exposition and illustration of the mental processes by which so large a portion of language has been created, the reader should turn to Professor Müller’s volume, to which I have already referred. Wholly different from this primeval process of naming things by unconscious metaphors is the modern metaphor, as we find it in the poets. When Shelley speaks of the moon as “That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon,” he is using a metaphor, and a very fine one, but he does so with perfect consciousness that it is a metaphor, and there is not the least danger of the poet, or any one else, confounding the moon with any maiden, earthly or heavenly. Again, when Mrs. Hemans addresses the moaning night-winds as “Wild, and mighty, and mysterious singers! At whose tones my heart within me burns,” there is no likelihood of any confusion between the winds and mortal singers, no chance of the metaphor ever growing into mythology. Once more: to return to Shelley—