Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic, or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head, the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says he, 'I'm _pater,_ and the subject; set me where you will, and I am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or, 'Now,' says he, 'I'm _patrem,_ and the object; go look for my lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' _Patrem filius amat,_ or _filius amat patrem,_ or in whatever order it may be, there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) _suffers_ the loving.--But now take a word in English. You can still recognise him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: _father_ is no such far cry from _pater:_--but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just _lumps_ backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the sentence.--Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the Pyrenees; and--pardon me!--the little old time-rounded tiny Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to them. The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round. There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem. There are no parts of speech: any word without change can do