We have not explored all the properties of words any more than of matter. There are shores waiting for Columbus. We can not determine exactly their _psycho-plasm_, so to speak. We do not know all the phosphoric, ancient visions that enveloped them, and still cling to them. Their boundaries are always changing. They can not be definitely measured. They possess _degrees_ of being potently visible. For incalculable time the souls of races have wrapped them with love. They have borne intact, to today, the dreams of the world. In England, in days of Shakespeare, words were fat, red-blooded, unctuous. In America they have been growing leaner and leaner. We lack greatly the rich variety of the older country. Our speech has lost a kind of vigor, sweetness, substantiality. As late as Stevenson, this quality remained in English prose. It has never been transplanted, successfully, to America. We are losing, too, some of our fine, former pride in Saxon strength, which is our heritage. We are less faithful to ideals. We are falling away from its precepts. We are losing sight of belief in the desirability of its future power over our race. We are turning rather briskly toward foreign gods, toward false standards. We are losing, too, the homely faith and friendliness of English social life, which is something whose strength we can not estimate; its merriment, uncomplaining courage, in the heart. We have nothing to substitute, or worse, things not our own. They who loved words best, and perhaps understood best their varying values, were decadent Greek and Roman writers, who looked upon them as gems, who knew all their tints, their shades, and certain French writers, a little later (roughly estimating) than 1830. Callimichus loved them in the ancient world. He spoke of them as the Arab loved and spoke of _Saïf_, the sword. Something clean, cruel, powerful, decisive, uncompromising. Mallarmé, of the moderns, I think has loved them best. Hokusai, the Japanese print-maker, cried with sincerity: _Write me down as the old man who is mad about line._ With equal sincerity I exclaim: Write me down as the woman who is mad about words.