One fytte is done-- Yet sith thus far we twain have gone, I'll "ply my wrest,"[1] then tell thee more Of the loves of the Lady Leonore. L. L. [Footnote 1: _Wrest_ was the name of the key used in tuning his harp by the ancient _Songleur_ or minstrel. "Ply my wrest" is an expression to be met with frequently in the early English poets.] ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA. The preservation of a pure English diction is not sufficiently aimed at in America. Some are so entirely Britannic, as to receive every thing for legal tender in letters, which comes across the water. This is thenceforward duly '_marqué au coin_.' Others are so patriotically republican, as to set about the task of nursing the countless brood of cis-Atlantic words, into literary respectability. Both are in error. It is not enough to avoid Amercanisms; nor is it expedient to manufacture a pye-bald dialect, of vulgarisms and provincialisms, for the mere satisfaction of calling it our own. In England, no less than here, the language is growing to an unhealthy exuberance, and many of the words which {111} are fathered on the poor Americans, are distempered excrescences of the overgrown British trunk. Nothing but the appeal to a standard of former golden days of literature and classic taste, can save the noble tongue of freemen from becoming an unwieldy, cacophonious, inconsistent mass of crudities. How much more is there danger, lest the other party, by encouraging unauthorized and American inventions in language, lay the foundation for provincial dialects, which shall hopelessly diverge from one another, until the Mississippian and the Virginian shall be as diverse as were the Athenian and the Macedonian. What this difference was, may be seen at a glance even in Demosthenes on the crown; where the orator blunders in Attic, while he reads in the same breath a decree of the Byzantes in broad-mouthed Doric. To some minds this may seem a trifling subject; like the countryman's nightingale in Catullus, '_vox et praeterea nihil_.' But, as Mirabeau said, _Words are things._ Language and thought act reciprocally. Unity of speech presupposes unity of thinking; but it also propagates it. Where provincial dialects begin to grow into languages, there is a corresponding divergence of national feeling. In our boundless country, after all our attempts to the contrary, this diversity of language will take place. It is now taking place. We begin to distinguish by his idiom and his pronunciation, the New Englander, the Southron, and the native of the great Western Valley. And there is no possibility of avoiding a separation of greater moment, without some common and acknowledged standard to which the appeal may be made; a standard not fabricated, but adopted--which shall be maintained by men of letters, in opposition to the immensely varying license of the illiterate mass in the respective districts of America.