When we come nearer the surface of our subject and speak of language, we remark that pure English, so far as such is possible, is the most convenient and expressive.  Saxon words cannot be used too plentifully.  They abridge and condense and smack of life and experience, and form the nerve and sinew of the best writing of our day; while the Latin is the fat.  The Saxon puts small and convenient handles to things, handles that are easy to grasp; while your ponderous Johnsonian phraseology distends and exaggerates, and never peels the chaff from the wheat.  Johnson’s periods act like a lever of the third kind,—­the power applied always exceeds the weight raised; while the terse, laconic style of later writers is eminently a lever on the first principle, and gives the mind the utmost purchase on the subject in hand.

The language of life, and of men who speak to be understood, should be used more in our books.  A great principle anchored to a common word or a familiar illustration never looses its hold upon the mind; it is like seeing the laws of Astronomy in the swing of a pendulum, or in the motion of the boy’s ball,—­or the law of the tides and the seasons appearing in the beating of the pulse, or in inspiring and expiring the breath.  The near and the remote are head and tail of the same law, and good writing unites them, giving wholeness and continuity.  The language of the actual and the practical applied to the ideal brings it at once within everybody’s reach, tames it, and familiarizes it to the mind.  If the writers on metaphysics would deal more in our every-day speech, use commoner illustrations, seek to find some interpreter of the feelings and affections of the mind in Nature, out of the mind itself, and thus keep the life-principle and the thought-principle constantly wedded, making them mutually elucidate and explain each other, they would be far more fruitful and satisfying.  Cousin is the only writer we know of who has made any attempt at this, and we believe him to be the most consistent and intelligent metaphysician that has yet appeared.  Surely, one cannot reasonably object to the height in the heavens from which a man steals his fire, if he can feed it with his own fuel and cook meat with it.  Though the genealogy of our ideas be traceable to Jove and Olympus, they must marry their human sisters, the facts of common life and experience, before they can be productive of anything positive and valuable.

Proverbs give us the best lessons in the art of expression.  See what vast truths and principles informing such simple and common facts!  It reminds one of suns and stars engraved on buttons and knife-handles.  Proverbs come from the character, and are alive and vascular.  There is blood and marrow in them.  They give us pocket-editions of the most voluminous truths.  Theirs is a felicity of expression that comes only at rare moments, and that is bought by long years of experience.

There is no waste material in a good proverb; it is clear meat, like an egg,—­a happy result of logic, with the logic left out; and the writer who shall thus condense his wisdom, and as far as possible give the two poles of thought in every expression, will most thoroughly reach men’s minds and hearts.