than I myself understand much that is said by some very clever people at Oxford or Cambridge.  There is more true employment of language, more bona fide currency of speech, between a sayer and a sayee who understand each other, though neither of them can speak a word, than between a sayer who can speak with the tongues of men and of angels without being clear about his own meaning, and a sayee who can himself utter the same words, but who is only in imperfect agreement with the sayer as to the ideas which the words or symbols that he utters are intended to convey.  The nature of the symbols counts for nothing; the gist of the matter is in the perfect harmony between sayer and sayee as to the significance that is to be associated with them.

Professor Max Muller admits that we share with the lower animals what he calls an emotional language, and continues that we may call their interjections and imitations language if we like, as we speak of the language of the eyes or the eloquence of mute nature, but he warns us against mistaking metaphor for fact.  It is indeed mere metaphor to talk of the eloquence of mute nature, or the language of winds and waves.  There is no intercommunion of mind with mind by means of a covenanted symbol; but it is only an apparent, not a real, metaphor to say that two pairs of eyes have spoken when they have signalled to one another something which they both understand.  A schoolboy at home for the holidays wants another plate of pudding, and does not like to apply officially for more.  He catches the servant’s eye and looks at the pudding; the servant understands, takes his plate without a word, and gets him some.  Is it metaphor to say that the boy asked the servant to do this, or is it not rather pedantry to insist on the letter of a bond and deny its spirit, by denying that language passed, on the ground that the symbols covenanted upon and assented to by both were uttered and received by eyes and not by mouth and ears?  When the lady drank to the gentleman only with her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there no conversation because there was neither noun nor verb?  Eyes are verbs, and glasses of wine are good nouns enough as between those who understand one another.  Whether the ideas underlying them are expressed and conveyed by eyeage or by tonguage is a detail that matters nothing.

But everything we say is metaphorical if we choose to be captious.  Scratch the simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor.  Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can call them language.  They are indeed potential language, and the symbols employed presuppose nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech; but for the most part it is in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any letter is conveyed.  There are words unwritten and untranslatable into any nouns that are nevertheless felt as above, about