us once of a very rocky clearing, said, "Stone's got a pretty heavy mortgage on that farm"; and another, wishing to give us a notion of the thievishness common in a certain village, capped his climax thus:--"Dishonest! why, they have to take in their stone walls o' nights." Any one who has driven over a mountain-stream by one of those bridges made of _slabs_ will feel the force of a term we once heard applied to a parson so shaky in character that no dependence could be placed on him,--"A slab-bridged kind o' feller!" During some very cold weather, a few years ago, we picked a notable saying or two. "The fire don't seem to git no kind o' _purchase_ on the cold." "They say Cap'n M'Clure's gone through the Northwest Passage." "Has? Think likely, and left the door open, too!" Elder Knapp, the once noted itinerant preacher, had a kind of unwashed poetry in him. We heard him say once,--"Do you want to know when a Unitarian" (we think it was) "will get into heaven? When hell's froze over, and he can skate in!" We quote merely for illustration, and do not mean to compare the Elder with Taylor or South. The element of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of American humor. In Dr. Petri's "Compact Handbook of Foreign Words,"[A] (from which Mr. Bartlett will be surprised to learn that _Hoco-pocos_ is a nickname for the Whig party in the United States,) we are told that the word _humbug_ "is commonly used for the exaggerations of the North-Americans." One would think the dream of Columbus half-fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West the near way to Orientalism, at least of diction. But it seems to us that a great deal of what is set down as mere exaggeration is more fitly to be called intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms of the imaginative faculty in full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw material.[B] By-and-by, perhaps, the world will see it worked up into poem and picture, and Europe, which will be hard-pushed for originality ere long, may thank us for a new sensation. The French continue to find Shakspeare exaggerated, because he treated English just as our folk do when they speak of "a steep price," or say that they "freeze to" a thing. The first postulate of an original literature is, that a people use their language as if they owned it. Even Burns contrived to write very poor English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Horace Mann, in one of his Addresses, commented at some length on the beauty of the French phrase _s'orienter_, and called on his young hearers to practise it in life. There was not a Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out what was "_about east_" and shape his course accordingly. The Germans have a striking proverb; _Was die Gans gedacht, das der Schwan vollbracht_; What the goose but thought, that the swan fullbrought; or, to de-Saxonize it a little, _pace_ Mr. Bartlett, What the goose conceived, that the swan